


The Poet

by quagmireisadora



Category: K-pop, SHINee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cruise Ship, Angst and Romance, Fluff and Smut, M/M, POV Alternating, Strangers to Lovers, Temporal Paradox, final edit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:27:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24816835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quagmireisadora/pseuds/quagmireisadora
Summary: Smash hit songwriter Jonghyun spent his whole bonus on a two-week summer cruise tour to get his inspiration back. He doesn't realize it'll come in the form of Kim Kibum, a wayward staff member with big dreams.
Relationships: Kim Jonghyun/Kim Kibum | Key
Comments: 8
Kudos: 23
Collections: Summer of SHINee General Collection





	The Poet

**Author's Note:**

> Originally intended for [Summer of SHINee 2019](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Summer_of_SHINee_2019/works) but I was a coward. Credit to the prompter.

* * *

_Click_

* * *

As he strolled along the length of the starboard deck one evening, Jonghyun threw up.

His fingers gripped the railing and his eyes watered while he emptied his stomach with a heave, slowly crouching against the metal and feeling a sob surface out of his throat. 

“Rough, huh?” a deep voice nearby asked him in English, putting a stop to his tears. He gasped at the suddenness of the sound and whipped his head around until he found the source. A man, crew apparently, from his ridiculous uniform. He had a buzz cut, deep midnight hair with shaved sides. He looked more like a military man than someone serving on a holiday cruise, with a bulky watch strapped on his wrist. A cut along the end of his right eyebrow, an orange-tipped cigarette, a gaze as deep as the sea. It gave him the appearance of danger, even in the awkward sailor costume.

Jonghyun didn’t reply.

Kibum surveyed the man in question with curiosity. He was still squatting as he stared back, eyes a little wild and jaw a little loose. Was he foreign? Was he deaf? He asked after the man’s health in Japanese and still got nothing. Then with some annoyance, insistently motioned an _‘are you OK?’_ in sign language and finally, finally received a comprehending response—a soft nod.

“I… I’m sorry you had to see that,” a hoarse voice apologized to him in Korean. Kibum was oddly reminded of wool. Balls of yarn that covered an old wooden floor, hugging his feet when he walked over them.

He shook his head in dismissal. “Happens all the time,” he walked to the railing. Hanging off it, he took a few more puffs of his smoke before stamping it under an immaculately polished shoe. “Have you tried jerking off?” he asked conversationally after a moment of comfortable silence.

Jonghyun felt a sizzle rise on his face. “E-eh?!” he demanded. “Wh-what did you say…?!”

Kibum shrugged the man’s shock off. “Or you could scream. But that's just going to make you look crazy,” he joked and took out the pack of cigarettes in his pocket to tap a second one out. “See, it's all about tightening the muscles here,” he pointed at his stomach. “Makes it easier to hold your dinner down.” 

He nearly put the second smoke in his mouth when he noticed the man’s gobsmacked expression and gave a chuckle. “Aigoo, ahjussi, don’t look at me like that. We _all_ do it!” he insisted. “The whole crew knows that trick. Works every time.”

Jonghyun put a hand to his face, a little offended. _Ahjussi?_ He didn’t look that old, did he? “W-works, you say?”

“Yeah, I just tugged one out this morning,” the man replied nonchalantly. “Ay, you got a light on you by any chance, man?”

Jonghyun consciously shuffled away from the guy. “N-no!” he denied. “I… why would I? I wouldn’t! I’m not a smoker! What’s a light going to do for me? I–I don’t smoke!” he said, feeling like he had to defend himself.

The man scoffed at him. “Relax,” he said. “Just need a light.” A soft laugh mocked him before throwing the unlit cigarette into the sea. He shot Jonghyun a casual salute and sauntered away, returning to the darkness that had produced him.

* * *

_“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.”_

The voice was soft, like it belonged to lullabies, not sputtering PA systems hanging from a corner of the ceiling. Were he not inconvenienced at that moment, Jonghyun would’ve been able to connect it to the man he’d seen welcoming passengers as they boarded. Would’ve even smiled at the memory of puffy palms and a hooked nose: the captain had been young and handsome. Something about him spoke volumes of reliability and strength. Something about him—

“Urgh!” his throat let out a miserable sound as his stomach let out his breakfast. He coughed and spat half-digested food before turning around and leaning against the toilet seat. He should’ve listened to his noona when she urged him to buy seasickness medication. He should’ve listened to his intuition telling him not to go on this trip in the first place.

_“We are nearing a storm system off the coast of Hong Kong and will be experiencing some minor discomfort as a result. For your own safety, please calmly follow any of the crew to the nearest emergency assembly areas. We are deeply regretful of any inconvenience caused. I repeat…”_

As the announcement went in and out of his perception, he sobbed a little with tiredness. This was awful. This was the worst. A vacation? This was a joke, and a disappointing one at that. He wiped his cheeks with the heel of a palm, internally reprimanding himself for being a child.

“It didn’t work?” a now-familiar voice called to him from outside the bathroom.

Kibum wasn’t supposed to enter private cabins unless it was to change the bedding or clean the toilets. He wasn’t allowed, they could dock his pay if they found out.

Of course, that never stopped him.

If a rich old lady in a fur-lined coat requested his company, or a man with golden rings invited him to one of the exclusive luxury suites—all that money? All that extra cash? He’d have to be very hard-pressed to refuse. No, he didn’t give a shit about the rules. The staff probably all knew, anyway: sometimes he would ask Taemin to stand guard outside. Sometimes he would send messages through the guy. The spoils would be split between them, of course. Fifty-fifty, that was the deal.

 _That idiot kid_ , Kibum thought even at a time like this. He had a big mouth. Too big for his own good.

But if Captain Lee Jinki—the outwardly righteous man that he was—had ever caught wind of his subordinates’ escapades, he certainly didn’t seem to care. Kibum was still employed, wasn’t he? Still here, toting bottles of complementary shampoo and conditioner from room to room, every summer and each winter that followed. He was still stuck here, despite his perfidious dealings with passengers.

He didn’t care, after all: not for this job, not for the people whose shit he had to clean up. He didn’t care about anything. 

But the retching had sounded violent enough that he just had to leave the change of sheets behind and walk across the cabin to take a look. When he was close enough to the bathroom door he’d caught the tail-end of a sad groan and a soft sob. It had pricked his sympathy, drawn him closer, the urge to comfort starting to bubble over from within his chest. 

That’s what he’d say if there were ever a complaint, anyway.

Jonghyun crawled around and noticed his visitor. Recognizing the man with the scar and cigarette, he ran a self-conscious hand over his face, hoping he didn’t have anything unsightly stuck to it. “U-uhm...” he faltered. “Wh-what?”

“I said,” Kibum started repeating, crouching to level their gazes. “Jerking off. It didn’t work?” he asked with a shake of his head.

The man blinked like he didn’t understand, his irises a little golden in the sterile light of the cabin. Outside, the rain battered the side of the ship, pattering against metal and fiberglass and making odd muffled gunshot-like sounds through the insulation. “I… I didn’t—” the sentence faded before it could take on any real color.

“What, too shy to try?” Kibum gave half a smile and held out a soft, freshly-laundered hand towel. The gesture was his preamble, his icebreaker. “Or too sad to do it alone?”

Jonghyun gave the other a downcast expression. “I… just want to go home,” he admitted. It was the truth. This trip was not his idea. He’d said he was fine, OK to keep working, keep writing more limp lyrics for producers to use on their improv tracks. He’d insisted there was no fatigue, no block, no frustration to overcome. He’d even sat in on a recording session and cheered for the stand-in singer, smiling pleasantly and offering compliments to anyone listening.

But Minho had taken one look and immediately seen it, immediately pointed it out when they met for coffee one afternoon—the disappointment. The forlorn realization that it was all futile, and that his work was amounting to nothing but formulaic, meaningless pop songs that faded in and out of fashion on the radio. Minho had caught sight of that feeling, brought it up in a casual conversation. And then the following week there had been tickets in the letterbox—a trip for one adult on the Southern Starship luxury liner, bound for the Strait of Malacca, all expenses paid.

Jonghyun had wanted to return the envelope to its sender with a note reading a bold _no, thank you._ But before he could, Sodam had noticed it on the kitchen counter and then there was no turning the offer away. He had to go, or she wasn’t going to talk to him ever again—those had been her exact words.

Of course, he didn’t relay all that to the man in front of him, but maybe his face narrated a story of its own. He was awarded with a grin for it.

Kibum had a set routine for how these things went. He’d work his charm, say a few comforting things, give a few comforting touches: and then wait. Like luring his quarry with bait. He was a good hunter, a good marksman with the bow of his skills.

“Well, we’re in the middle of the sea, and there’s a storm raging outside,” he started in a low voice, inching a little closer. “For a first-timer. It must be scary, right?”

The man hummed, studying his lap. 

"You must really be regretting this trip."

"It's… it's not too bad. I mean, the food is nice, at least—" the other would've probably gone on with his exemptions had he not looked up to find an advancing Kibum, stalking closer towards him. He immediately, visibly tensed.

"You like the food?" 

A tentative nod. 

"And? What else do you like?" the question was crafted into a soft, breathy murmur. Kibum crawled nearer and nearer to the man, to his target, his cash cow. His hands walked over the floor until one landed between the other's thighs.

A loud gulp.

“You know…” Kibum’s words were lazy, his sentences heavy. Dragging. Their faces were close together, at a distance where he could smell the sweat on the other's skin. “Going home is a bit impossible right now," he tilted his head, vision drifting over the man's features. "But you're on vacation, aren't you? Do you want to keep thinking of home, or…” he stalled for a beat, hand offering another towel. “Do you want to forget?”

Jonghyun forgot. He forgot his words and his train of thought. The recording studio may or may not have been a figment his imagination. Minho and Sodam became a distant memory. His sight filled with obsidian eyes, their gaze on him intense. It burned against his cheeks like lasers peeling him open in search of secrets. “What… what do you have in mind?” he stiffly questioned.

The grin widened. “How about a deal?” 

* * *

When the man pulled at the button on Jonghyun’s shorts, he let out a surprised sound, holding his hands out and putting a stop to the motion. “Wh-what’re you doing–?!” he asked, completely puzzled.

“What?” a scarred eyebrow rose at him. “You want me to wine and dine you first?”

Jonghyun blinked down at the other. He supposed the man was right. This was a transaction. This was something he’d agreed to. Something he’d promised money for. _Something shameful_ , he thought in the far corner of his mind but ignored for now. The man was waiting for him to give his permission.

Jonghyun gave a stuttering nod.

Kibum didn’t waste any time. He **had** none to waste. When he’d decided to meet at this discreet location, away from prying eyes, he’d also done it with enough thought for where he had to be next. He could easily run there, once they were done. He could run that distance. But what would guests think of a sweaty and dishevelled server? Not much that’s what, and neither would his boss. 

Detaining his uncertainties for the time being, he undid the other’s pants and yanked them down, boxers sliding with them as he did. The motion helped him make up his mind to be quick and be efficient.

But the guy wasn’t even hard. Not even close.

“What, you don’t think I’m hot?” he demanded, feeling a twinge of embarrassment.

The other blinked down at him in reply, shifted his weight from foot to foot, nervously inspecting their surroundings as if to check if they truly were alone or if this was some kind of prank. “I… I don’t—I mean...”

Kibum let out a sigh, motioning dismissively of the other to be quiet. “OK, let me think for a minute. Do you like foreplay?” he asked and stood up without waiting for an answer. He took in the man's appearance, his scandalized face, his wide eyes, his trembling exhales. _Easy_ , he thought to himself as he moved forward and closed his mouth over a speeding pulse. He hummed for show at the taste. It was sweat, it was soap, it was some sort of expensive cologne. He slipped his hands under the other’s shirt and dragged them upwards, holding the other by his armpits.

A tiny squeak answered him. He smirked.

It was when he looked over the man again with some more attention that he noticed the tattoos. On the wrist, on the inside of his arm–even on the side of his ribcage. He settled for the one closest to him, the squiggle of black ink behind a pierced ear. He pressed his lips to the place, rested his tongue against the bone for a moment as he let out a deep sigh.

Jonghyun melted. He melted against the tongue against the eyes against the fingers. He became a mass of molten and splashing want as the man continued to hold him in all the ways he liked to be held. When he'd been sunning himself that morning, he hadn't known what to expect as he was told to show up on the service deck by a hurried whisper. He hadn't known what he would end up doing, but this certainly wasn't it. Maybe he had been naive. Maybe he had been underprepared for this kind of exchange, but now that he was accosted by a large pair of palms and a black pair of eyes, he wasn't so averse to the attention. 

The ship gave a lurch, but he didn’t even notice when his back arched out from the partition behind him. He let out a muffled sound against the bunched up fabric of his shirt. A tongue slid lower and lower, skidding over his neck, skating across his collarbone, and as it did he felt a spot of coldness in the mass of warm wet muscle. 

Jonghyun blinked a few times, placing his hand on a solid shoulder and bringing attention to himself. When the man straightened in silent question, he leaned forward and tilted his head.

“Stop stop stop…” Kibum shook his head. “I don’t kiss.”

Jonghyun opened his eyes, his own tongue nearly sticking out. “Oh…” He felt stupid. He felt like he was an idiot. He sank back against the partition. “OK…” he said with some disappointment. Perhaps he was wrong to expect a show of affection when he'd obviously been offered this on the merit of his wallet. 

Kibum looked at the gradual droop in the man’s shoulders, the descent in his once steadily growing arousal. He looked down between them at the man’s softening hardness. It felt like an insult to him, to his abilities. He grit his teeth in anger and decided he was going to leave this man dazed. “You want a kiss? Fine,” he acquiesced through grit teeth and gave the other no time to process the words before he pushed their lips together.

Jonghyun made an embarrassingly high-pitched sound when he felt the tongue in his mouth this time. He’d been right. _He’d been right_. The bead of metal played with him. Played with his mind. He whimpered against the other’s cheek, hips moving farther out from the wall and into the tightened fist holding him, coaxing him, teasing him. He'd felt like this before, innumerable times, and he knew it was only the beginning of a slow descent into chaos. But he would follow that descent, like every other time. He would fall hard, and when they were done the other would leave him in his place on the ground without a second glance.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, he thought even as he was gripped and fondled and caressed. Maybe he was fooling himself when he assumed this would distract him from his homesickness. Maybe this dangerous-looking stranger was just like other dangerous-looking strangers before him, only meaning to taking advantage of Jonghyun and—

“Yeah, yeah I get it,” Kibum said and went back to his knees. He took in the pulsing steaming organ in his clutch and stroked it a few times. He was gifted a strangled squeal, a raspy whimper. He nodded in understanding, _so this is what you like. This is easy_. As long as the people who paid him for his service weren’t freaks of some sort, he could manage just fine. He could do well without the stress of wanting to impress.

He took the man in his mouth and did what he usually did–did it with little finesse and plenty of rushing until his radio crackled at his hip, signalling dinner preparations in the banquet hall.

“Shit…” Kibum checked the time on his wrist. “Hurry up, will you?” he asked the man, who—

Jonghyun held onto the large metal crates on either side of him, fingers closing on the sheets and pillow covers that filled them. The crown of his head touched the wall behind him. His mouth gasped open in a gravelly moan. He pushed himself to the partition, pushed himself into the man’s mouth, pushed himself in a dozen different directions as he slowly unwound.

He had never expected it to feel so good. **So** good. And maybe it didn’t actually feel as good. Maybe it was all in his head, and just the idea of it made him reel. Maybe the visions in his mind were more stimulating than the sensations on his skin. He couldn’t tell the difference, couldn’t even form his thoughts in the right sequence.

Reaching down, he let his fingers run through short prickly hair.

Kibum watched the perspiration dripping down the other’s veined neck. It was hot down here, where the service pipes and laundry steamers worked overtime. It was sweltering, this close to the engine, of that he was aware. He knew, he knew it well. But he watched the lines of sweat trail down towards him anyway, his hand sitting forgotten on a throbbing pulse. It was hypnotic how the body moved against the circled heat of his palm; reached for closer proximity of his mouth. He stroked a few more times, blinked as he watched fragments of the man flake off and drop on his head.

When hazel eyes timidly peeked down at him, he held the gaze. Putting his tongue out, he aligned his piercing with the head of the man’s cock and dragged a long languid lick over it.

Jonghyun lost his mind a little bit then. He yanked the man up by his collar to make him stand and level their sights again. He folded his arms over a pair of wide shoulders and placed his lips on the smooth curve of a jaw, leaning forward like he was going to drink the other up. Eat all of him. Take him within his mouth and swallow. Digest. Absorb him into his blood.

“ _Oh..._ I like you,” he keened without thought or restraint. “I like you so much.”

After a moment of being dazed himself, Kibum pushed the other away, masking his astonishment behind a wall of anger. “ **Stop** that,” he growled between panting breaths.

“Why?” Jonghyun asked indelicately, swiping a thumb over the other’s lower lip and having his hand slapped away. He blinked in surprise, withdrawing into himself when he realised his rudeness. “I’m… I’m sorry.”

Kibum shook his head in disgust and walked away from the man. Left him with his pants around his ankles and his face utterly shocked. It didn’t matter if he lost the money, it didn’t matter if a crewmate walked in and found what he was leaving behind. It didn’t matter if Jinki suspended his contract over something like this. This was shit. This was absolute garbage. _Homesick? Fuck that_ , he thought. He didn’t want any part in it.

* * *

That night, Jonghyun pulled his guitar out of the tight fit in the cabin wardrobe and waited for the strings to start biting. 

Bringing it along on the trip had been a last-minute thought. A run-back-upstairs-for-it-while-the-taxi-waited kind of thing. He hadn’t tuned it in a long while, hadn’t run his fingertips over the fretboard in many months. But now, after the day’s events and a long way away from home, he remembered it.

The distance between that night and the last time he’d tried to strum something could’ve run well into years, but he still remembered the notes he loved the most. He still recalled the chords that could make him cry all by themselves. When he played them one after the other, when he weaved them together and gave it a beat; when he hummed along in the background, the burn in his eyes was as strong as on his fingers. Without meaning to, without thinking about it too much, he made a little song. Perhaps someone else’s song, from a distant and unclear memory. But he made it just the same.

His digits were sore as he wrote down words to go with it, but he would welcome the calluses when they grew. He would welcome people to know, if they ever heard these words in cafes and sang along, if they searched for the lyrics online and gave an acknowledging smile. He would be content in being discovered, remembered, being thought of. 

When he played the song again in its completed length, it reminded him of a sad story. Not his own, but a story that made him weep nonetheless. A story that would maybe have the world weep along too. If only they would nod that _yes, that person went through a lot, that person fought with their life, that person fought things they couldn’t even see, and ultimately lost. But we heard the story, we thought of it tonight, and that is their victory._ If the world ever took his writing like that, it would be enough.

He wrote a lot that night, in his waking hours and beyond. He wrote and plucked lonely notes on his guitar, finding an odd victory for himself too. A victory against what, he couldn’t define. Perhaps the quickly-fading idea that this cruise would be a break from his thoughts. Perhaps the long-abandoned hope that something would come out of him trying, daring, doing something he would never do—traveling to new places, meeting new people, even accepting the offer of a complete stranger to comfort him. Perhaps there was no victory after all, and he had lost this time too, when that stranger dismissed him. Perhaps it was all for the better. Perhaps his losing was his winning. Perhaps he’d lost a little more than he realized, and with each swallowed shot of the soju he’d ordered for himself, he saw the page of lyrics now as a little more inconsequential.

But Jonghyun still wrote.

How many stories did he know? In his thirty years, how many did he share through his songs? How many did he think of that night? How many would he take away with himself, never to exchange lips or ears? How many stories did he think he would write by himself, before he’d give up writing altogether? How many stories could he have written of himself as happy and complete, to convince himself that he could be happy and complete? How many could he write hoping they would reach their intended destinations? 

How many until he tired of it again, stowed the guitar away again, for several more years? He may never find out.

There is a river somewhere beyond discovery and loss. Its water is made of the wounds of everyone who came before. It isn’t red with blood, but clear as spring water. It steams, as if boiling, and distorts the air around itself. It races over stones and earth, cutting its way through blocks and barricades, eroding the land with its force. Many years from now, when Jonghyun’s words start to fade, and he walks away from his blank notebooks, he’ll be by this river. Wading the gurgling waters and crossing over to the other side. Perhaps someone would be waiting for him on the opposite bank, their arms held out wide and their smile held out welcoming. Perhaps such a fate awaited him, when he stopped walking.

This he dreamt.

* * *

The storm hadn’t subsided, and the ship had dropped anchor. There was groaning and grumbling all over the vessel—guests were tired of being indoors, staff were overworked trying to keep them entertained. An impromptu concert was put on with some of the regular dancers and musicians. Even some of the cleaning staff managed to arrange a small talent show for the amusement of full banquet halls.

Kibum would’ve tried to make the most of the situation by looking for the richest and most bored faces in the audience. He would’ve poured a few drinks and spoken a few flirty lines. He would’ve narrated false anecdotes to make them laugh, would’ve gone the distance to please them and offer his company.

But he wasn’t feeling it. He wasn’t feeling anything.

He smiled and acted pleasant, like he was on autopilot. Like he wasn’t really there. He was somewhere several miles away, on a different ocean enveloping a different coastline, a different landmass. Like he was a different person in a different body.

Taemin stayed close, nudged him whenever he got too muddled in his thoughts. He’d shake it off every time he felt the elbow against him. He'd snap out of it and continue being the affable kind of man-boy guests preferred to deal with. But when the noise and the laughter started wearing him too thin he ducked out of the impromptu party, fished out a battered pack of cigarettes, and prepared to shut himself down for the night.

Jonghyun would’ve turned and walked in a different direction if he’d seen the other coming from a distance. But in the muddle of crowds and noise and thoughts of wanting to get off this ship, they bumped shoulders. And then there was no escaping. 

A plastic lighter clattered to the floor, sliding a short distance away. Jonghyhun bent and picked it up to offer to the person. He started to apologise too, before he noticed who the person was. Then he cleared his throat and began his apology again, with more sincerity.

“I…” he tried. “About that day in the laundry. You were trying to help, and I was ungrateful—” he bowed his head, not wanting to connect their eyes out of shame. “I’m sorry about that.”

“It’s OK,” came the rushed response, clammy fingers plucking the lighter away and pocketing it. “Please enjoy the festivities, sir.”

Jonghyun frowned and looked up at that. “B-but you were kind to me. And I shouldn’t have burdened you by saying something like that, so—”

“ **I said** : please enjoy. The festivities,” the words came from behind a thightened jaw and shifty eyes.

He stared with confusion. “W-what—?” he tried to continue. An angry grip on his elbow shut him up. 

Fumbling with his words and explanations, Jonghyun was led down the hallway and to the underside of a wide flight of stairs that would usually open up to the main deck. Tonight, the doors at the top were unyieldingly shut. The halls were lit up bright as if to erase the storm from people’s minds, but in this passageway, beneath the metal treads and risers, the air felt dank.

He gulped when they came to a halt.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Kibum demanded when they were out of earshot of the other the guests and staff. “You could get me dismissed if you talk like that. This is my place of _work,_ did you forget that?!” he hissed.

A pair of eyes widened at him, stupefied as they looked up through a film of growing moisture. Like there was no reason for Kibum to be so brash. Even to his own conscience, it didn’t make sense why he was being like this. Why was he saying these things? It wasn’t like he gave a shit about the job, he didn’t give a shit about getting caught...

What **did** he give a shit about, then? What really mattered to him? And why did this innocuous-looking short and quiet man drive him to face that question again and again, since they’d first met a week ago? Why, when he’d done this innumerable times before, and never once had to face the consequences of it: what was this compunction now, after all these years? Why was he suddenly feeling disgusted with himself?

“Just—” Kibum raised his hands between them and backed away, looking for an escape out of this conversation. “Leave me the fuck alone, OK?” he said lowly, and looked around, hoping no one had heard. “I want nothing to do with you anymore.”

Suddenly, Jonghyun wanted a reason. He wanted his closure. He wanted to start a fight. He opened his mouth and nearly formed the words of his imposition, nearly yelled them out for the air between them to carry it across. But a niggling voice inside him slowly grew louder and louder with every step the man took away. _He doesn’t like you_ , it said. _Just as you suspected, he never liked you, this was always about money for him. Don’t fuck with yourself, Kim Jonghyun. This isn’t a fairytale getaway. This is just your life._

And when the cognizance bulldozed him in that moment, he knew he’d been an idiot. “I’m sorry,” he weakly called out again with a hand to his chest, appalled by the largeness of his dashed expectations. “I’m sorry,” he attempted, louder, but the other was soon gone.

What a fool he’d been, what naivete he’d indulged himself in. Leaning against whatever he could reach for, he put a hand to his head. “Why did you do this,” he mumbled to himself, humiliation and disbelief ballooning incredibly wide in his chest. “You idiot… _why did you do this?!_ ”

Crouching there, Jonghyun spent a long time berating himself in the near-dark. Why did he let this happen? Why did he come on this vacation? Why did he not just spend it quietly and then go home? Why did he get involved with someone? Why did he expect more than he was offered? Why did he make it even worse? Why did he--? 

He spent long enough in the position that when the ship rocked once, hard port, his knees trembled as he quickly stood in a panic. A loud clang went off against the top of his head when he hit the underside of the stairs. Staggering to stay upright, he tasted blood and pain in his mouth.

Then the lights went out.

* * *

_Click_

* * *

As he strolled along the length of the starboard deck one evening, Jonghyun threw up.

His fingers gripped the railing and his eyes watered while he emptied his stomach with a heave, slowly crouching against the metal and feeling a sob surface out of his throat.

“Rough, huh?” a deep voice nearby asked him, putting a stop to his tears. He gasped at the suddenness of the sound and whipped his head around until he found the source. The man was bathed in darkness until he stepped forward. Jonghyun nearly reached out, nearly pulled him close, nearly continued to apologise. But then he stopped himself.

“Y-yeah…” he swallowed before saying. “Rough seas…”

“I meant your condition, but yeah,” the other chuckled, nodding. He took a long drag of his cigarette, the orange end momentarily glowing brighter. Jonghyun had felt that heat on the other's fingertips, when they'd skated over his arms and touched the sides of his waist. He remembered being branded by that touch, even if the dangerous-looking man knew nothing of what had passed between them. 

Kibum watched the guy for a minute. He seemed stunned. To be seasick? To be on a ship? To see another person on this hunk of metal, in the middle of the ocean? He couldn’t tell. Approaching the railing himself, he smoked until the stick ended and then crushed it under an immaculately polished shoe. “First time on a cruise?” he asked distantly, trying to kill time by making conversation. He had nothing to do for a few hours, no duty roster to bind him until dawn. He could afford to waste some breath on this.

“Y-yes…” a quiet voice answered him, ending in a self-conscious cough. Kibum was oddly reminded of rain. The patter of it on a tin roof, the scent of wet earth under his naked feet, the green of leaves as they were bathed in a shower.

He nodded, pursing his lips in sincerity. “Happens all the time,” he assured, hanging off the railing and looking out to rushing waves and racing wind. “Have you tried jerking off?” he inquired. 

Jonghyun blinked with some sadness. “I…” he started to say something then shook his head. “No. Does it help?”

Kibum ignored the strangely gloomy reaction. “Wanna try it?” he raised an eyebrow and asked with a smirk. If this guy was as gullible as he seemed, maybe Kibum could make a few hundred dollars off of him. 

“You mean—” the man tentatively began. “You mean with…?” he raised his eyebrows and nodded in Kibum’s direction to finish his sentence. _With you?_ the incongruently soft gaze seemed to imply. 

“Yeah, why not?”

Jonghyun knew why not, but he daren’t say. He knew what would happen, knew how it could end up, knew what it would birth in him. He knew what he would do and then what the other would do in response, like a seesaw of action and reaction that would eventually rust and fall apart. He knew how they would end before they started again. 

“Is… is that not going to be—I mean,” he pointed out. “Aren’t there rules against that kind of thing?”

“Sure,” the man shrugged. “Don’t really care, though. Do you?”

He hesitated and the other scoffed at him. “Relax,” he said. “We don’t have to do it right now. Time and place,” he assured. “I know that.”

Jonghyun filled with bashfulness. “O-OK…” he agreed.

* * *

_“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We are nearing a storm system off the coast of Hong Kong and will be experiencing some minor discomfort as a result. For your own safety, please calmly follow any of the crew to the nearest emergency assembly areas of the lower decks. We are deeply regretful of any inconvenience caused. I repeat…”_

Jonghyun heard the familiar words as he rinsed his mouth and straightened to face the mirror. The lack of sleep drew distinct circles under his eyes. He looked, and felt, terrible. He’d been sick again, and there was no stopping it. With an exhausted sigh he studied his hands, front and back, drying them on a towel. His pulse felt calm. His heart held no rush. Below the constant hum the ship made no other sound. The rain hadn't found them yet. It would be a few more hours. Or maybe they would bypass it altogether. He gathered a long breath of hope and walked out of the bathroom.

“Should we talk terms?” he was immediately greeted. 

He dropped the towel from his face and let it dangle to a side. _Caught_ , he thought blinking for a few moments. _Caught again._ Looking around the cabin, he found a chair in front of the dressing table. “If… if that’s how this works,” he slowly took a seat and allowed with a nod.

Kibum nodded in response. “You been tested?” he asked bluntly.

“F-for…?” the man blinked, a little cluelessness taking over his expression.

“IQ,” Kibum replied sarcastically, then made an exasperated sound. “STDs, obviously. I’m not going to do this if you’re gonna make me miserable later,” he chuckled mirthlessly, the memory of a past “client” coming back to haunt him in that moment, including all the pain and disgust he associated with it. Of course, that hadn’t discouraged him. But it had slowed him down for months, and he'd rather avoid that sort of ordeal if he could help it. 

“Oh!” realisation arrived for the other. He agreed again, with more certainty. “Y-yeah, of course. Sorry,” he said. “Yeah. I’m… I’m clean.”

“Got a family?” Kibum dug on. It didn’t really matter. He’d worked with plenty of married men and women. His morals weren’t so easily disturbed by it. But he wanted to know anyway, out of curiosity. “Kids, maybe?”

“No,” warm eyes momentarily turned the color of honey when they looked at him before looking away. “No. I’m alone.”

“Hmm… you look old enough,” the man said to Jonghyun and again he touched his face with embarrassment. He wasn’t _that_ old, he was sure he wasn’t. 

“A loner?” he was taunted.

He opened his mouth to voice his annoyance, but the other moved on easily. “Anyway. So here’s how it’ll go,” he was instructed. “If you want to see me, ask one of the serving staff at dinner for Kibum. **Kim** Kibum, not Jung,” the man specified. “That guy’s an asshole,” he murmured and shook his head. 

“Kibum,” Jonghyun weighed the name on his tongue, smiling a little. _An ideal_ , he realised the name meant. An example. A flawless paragon of humanity that never changed and never gave in to the coercive press of the world around him. A fighter who swam against the current.

“I charge a hundred dollars for every hour,” Kibum put forward his offer. “American,” he added, then after a moment of thought, specified some more. “Cash. Tax purposes, you see.”

“I… I didn’t exchange any money…” Jonghyun shook his head.

“Tch… what kind of tourist are you?” disappointment replied, but only momentarily. “OK, then pay me in won. But you better pay me!” Kibum warned him, wagging a finger.

“I will,” the man assured, and he seemed honest enough that Kibum didn’t ask him for promissory notes or signed letters. “You have my word.”

He worried his lower lip as he studied the other. The man was short, but he was muscular. His knees were a little scarred and his calves a lot defined. Stubby fingers played with loose strings on a pair of shorts, arms rippling with strength even through such a commonplace action. It made the man look careful, deliberate. It gave the impression of subdued power. 

“You don’t advertise,” Kibum went on as his eyes continued their survey. “We don’t make videos, we don’t take selcas. I won’t have my mug on the internet,” he clarified. 

“OK,” Jonghyun easily supplied.

“OK, then,” Kibum held his hands out in returned calmness. “What would you like me to do?”

A smile. “Talk to me.”

“T-talk?” the other frowned, hesitating. For a moment his eyes went to the door of the cabin before returning. “I thought this was about…?”

“I just—uhm,” Jonghyun’s smile faded. He had to be cautious, he had to tread carefully, with his eyes on his feet at all times. “If you don’t want to, that’s fine. This is just…” he tried to make up an explanation. “This is how I get comfortable.”

“Oh… huh,” the other let out. “Done this a lot, have you?” he asked with not much interest.

Jonghyun considered the question, considered how to answer it. With the truth or with the appropriate fallacy? He settled on the middle-ground of “a few times.”

“All men?”

“Yeah…” Jonghyun hummed.

“What kind of men do you like?” Kibum continued his questions, sitting forward now, elbows on knees. A small hint of interest spilled out from his vigilant tone.

Jonghyun kept his eyes on the other. “Sweet,” he replied. “Soft. Warm. Kind. Gentle. Appreciative,” he continued, and the longer he did the more trivial the words sounded to his own ears. Looking away with blushing cheeks, he settled for “someone who would always want me by their side,” then tilted his head in question.

“And… you?”

Kibum raised his eyebrows, pointing at his nose to confirm. “I like myself,” he shrugged.

The other let out a little laugh. It was sonorous. Like temple bells. Or like a little girl’s anklets. Delicate but resounding, echoing through Kibum’s head. A strange yearning grew in him to make the other laugh some more. No, much more.

“And?” the mirth stopped to ask.

“There’s no and,” Kibum showed his confusion. “I just like me. I haven’t liked anyone else in a very long time. I… I would fuck myself if I could,” he said matter-of-factly.

The man was stunned for a moment before his mouth let out a spray of amusement from between his lips. His hands clapped his thighs and his feet hovered in the air for a short series of seconds. “So what do you like about yourself?” he asked with a weirdly fond smile when his face softened.

“No,” Kibum countered, frowning as he advanced closer. “Tell me what you like about me.”

* * *

Jonghyun watched as the hand inched up and down inside his shorts. He watched with wide eyes while the man behind him held him, nearly encapsulated him in a tight hold of arms, like he wasn’t allowed to go anywhere. Like he wasn’t allowed to leave.

“K-Kibum…” he used the name he now knew to give the other, used it with all the breath he could spare when his chest wasn’t rumbling like a tank.

“Hmm?” a pair of lips closed over the lobe of his ear, pursing over it. “What?” a low exhale asked him. When he didn’t reply, their eyes met in the mirror. The hand in his shorts squeezed playfully. Jonghyun managed an odd squealing sound.

The man’s head fell back on Kibum’s shoulder. He turned from their reflection to the veins of a gulping neck, kissing up its length back to soft ears and sharp jaw. “You like that?” he quietly made his usual inquiries, murmured his usual incitement as his wrist spiralled on hard muscle. “Hmm? Is that good?” 

He got no response. Not a coherent one, in any case. He used his free hand to bring the man’s knuckles to himself, to his mouth. He kissed every crest and valley, kissed calloused fingertips and soft puffy palms. “You’re left-handed,” he observed. “Like that old song…” he hummed a few lines of the chorus, chuckling when honey eyes widened at his reflection.

“Y-you…?” the man started, halting to let out a soft gasp. “You listen to Lee Juck?!”

“Should I not?” Kibum asked seriously, his face slowly growing a teasing grin. “Your eyes are all bright now,” he whispered. “That big a fan?”

A nod and then another gasp rose to meet him when his thumb moved over the head of a leaking organ. “Is this because of me or him?” Kibum asked pointedly. The responding blush sent an odd electric charge along his front, from throat to crotch.

Jonghyun wanted to talk some more. Tell the other about the kind of music he liked, about the kind of lyrics he enjoyed. If he could, he wanted to play a song for the other, too. If he could. If he was allowed by their time together. He wanted to talk about his home and his family and his job and his co-workers and the studios that hired him and—

Kibum’s hips rolled in against his ass, the motion clean and practiced. As if he’d done it so many times before it was second nature to him. Jonghyun nearly lost his balance, arms shooting out in front of him.

“You OK?” he was pulled back against the other’s chest.

Jonghyun nodded, looped an arm above his head and behind Kibum’s to support himself. His eyes remained trained on their joint reflection but lost focus every time the hand in his shorts did something unexpected.

When Kibum had advanced on him, when he’d come closer and run his fingers on Jonghyun’s bare arms, he’d forgotten how to use his tongue. All thought of talk, of exchanging stories and growing closer and becoming more than just strangers making a trade—all of it disappeared the minute he was made to stand and turn around. The second Kibum’s long fingers squeezed the flesh of his rear.

Now he was a puppet, at the full mercy of this man.

The grip around him tightened, milking him unbearably slow. “What do you like about me?” he was probed again, a soundless laugh hitting his cheek soft as a feather. “Hmm? What’s making you so wet?”

“I—” the man made an attempt at replying.

Kibum didn’t actually care. As long as he got paid, he didn’t care. Usually. But this time he was curious. _This is too easy,_ he thought to himself. _How is this so easy?_ The people he’d serviced before hadn’t been half as unchallenging or as sincere. They’d been looking for a good time, and they’d been willing to pay the price. And for that price, Kibum had done a lot of wild stuff in his time on this ship, but this was… nothing like any of that. This was too simple. The whimpering utterances of his name, the shudder at every swipe of his thumb, the immense mountain of yearning in those eyes. Everything was far too simple. Like this was predestined, preplanned. Like this was meant to be and Kibum’s decisions were of no consequence.

Jonghyun felt Kibum’s hand slow. A frown stamped itself into his temple. “I… I like your hair,” he gulped and said for the sake of saying something.

“My hair?” the other derided with a bark of a laugh, the silver piercing glinting inside his mouth. His wrist came to a complete halt. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s… it smells like... like camellias,” Jonghyun’s fingers touched the short prickles on the back of Kibum’s neck, combing through them. “I like it,” he turned his head and murmured between their faces. They were too close to be certain, but he felt a hot gaze meet his before dropping a moment to his lips. It made his heart gallop.

“What else do you like?” a whisper on his philtrum spurred him on, wrist accompanying it with slow strokes.

Jonghyun keened. “Your…” he swallowed. “Your hands,” he closed his eyes and let his head fall back again. “Your… big, warm hands.”

“These ones?” the man confirmed faintly as he squeezed again, flesh and cloth made slippery with sweat. 

Jonghyun pursed his lips, but the moan strung out of his nose anyway. He let himself drown in the feeling of the long sets of fingers, one tugging and the other caressing. He let himself be played with, like a toy.

“And?” Kibum’s curiosity was replaced by a need to know. A famine of knowledge hit him when he jolted his hips out again, feeling the effect of their proximity between his legs. His wrist sped up. “What else makes you feel like this?”

Another moan replied before turning into a broken utterance of “e-eyes…!”

“Eyes?”

“Y-yeah…!” the man rasped, his voice drawn higher than its normal self. Another jolt raced the length of Kibum’s front. 

“What about my eyes?” he murmured as he pushed the waistband off and freed the simmering hardness in his hold, lips sucking on a rapidly thrumming pulse. “Hmm?” he prodded.

Edging closer and closer to spilling out, Jonghyun panted squealed begged as he urgently stilled the other’s hand on himself, earning a confused frown at the action.

“Wh-whats wrong?” he was quizzed.

The sobs kept him from speaking.

* * *

Let’s suppose that Jonghyun knows what he’s doing, what he’s getting himself into. Again.

Let’s suppose that he clicks his fingers to erase his mistakes, and when he does it now, he goes back in time by a week. Almost instantaneously. Let’s suppose that his heartbeat is steady, and his knees don’t buckle at the action. He looks like he hasn’t aged more than a few seconds, if at all. Let’s suppose he’s back at the perfect time—his one-week-younger self is in the shower and the cabin is unoccupied except for him and his exigence. He finds a paper. The paper. He finds a pen. The pen. He scrawls out a message. The message.

 _Get off this ship._ **_Now_** _._

Let’s suppose this is how it goes, every single time. He leaves, waits in the shadows for the discreet splash signaling his departure—the departure of his younger, unexposed and inexperienced self. Sometimes he swims, sometimes he uses an inflatable pontoon from one of the storage cabins in the service deck. Sometimes he just... disappears. Like a light being switched off in a room deep within the belly of the ship. No one hears or notices anything. Let’s suppose that the subtraction occurs as simply as that and there is only one Jonghyun now. Only one who stays. Only one who is bitter, lost, utterly resentful of having decided to do this… but also determined. To make things right, to fix them and return them to the way they should be. To re-establish order. **His** order. Let’s suppose he does not spend too long grieving the loss of his younger self.

A week of separation doesn’t make him too discernable from the other hims. The other Jonghyuns, who don't know what their future on the ship will shape up to be. As one leaves and another begins his journey on the cruise again, let’s suppose these Jonghyuns are almost exactly identical.

So which one of them likes Kibum?

Who, among all the Jonghyuns that have come and gone, is doing this for Kibum? Which one cares for him the most, if they all do, to some degree? Is it the one who stays and perseveres through the pain he knows is coming? Or is it the one who sacrifices what he will one day grow to feel, and what Kibum might one day grow to see: leaving it all behind to lead a different life? Which Jonghyun tells us his story now, and which Jonghyun do we never think about again except in the hours when the ship oscillates like a pendulum?

Is it the Jonghyun who is, or the one who isn't?

Which Jonghyun yearns more for Kibum’s arms? Which one has a clearer memory of the feeling of his lips? Which one spent the longest time deliberating on Kibum’s black crystal stare and which one answered with his own golden blinks? Which Jonghyun is the Jonghyun that truly wants to be here, only so he can make things right with Kibum? Which one is being driven by something else entirely—like being attracted to the wrong pole of a magnet? Which Jonghyun is honest about this, and which one is lying to himself? Is every Jonghyun different? Or is each copy an aggregate of the original? An average of those born between the first and the last? Does that mean every Jonghyun likes Kibum equally? As completely as he likes himself? Does it mean that there is effectively, just one Jonghyun?

What if none of them like Kibum? What if they are all suffering from a brand of delusion we only hear of in stories? In nightmarish tales and epics that end with the tragedy of star-crossed lovers?

Regardless, let’s suppose that Jonghyun can stop. If he is forced to, he can stop. If he is given a good reason to give up on tiny regrets and minuscule what-ifs; if by some mechanical alignment of fate, someone were to find him and stay his hand. Break his hand. Break his cyclical foolishness. Let’s suppose if that were ever to happen, he can cut the circle of his own creation and drag it out into a line. That he really can stop.

If he did, where would he go from there? Where would Kibum go? What would become of them? How would this flailing story ever come to an end, then, if he simply let it narrate itself?

Why would Jonghyun stop?

* * *

As the storm raged and the guests filed through the doors of the banquet hall, Kibum’s eyes found the man trying to slink away to a quiet corner. He followed closely, kept his stance and expression amicable lest they were being watched.

“If you wanted out, you could’ve just said something.” He’d been thinking the words for days after the encounter, running them through his head over and over. But when he spoke them out loud now, they sounded… tinny. Childish. Pathetic. He cared because the promise of extra pay had suddenly disappeared. That’s all. Nothing else. He cared only because of that, and yet—

And yet those eyes still looked at him like he was the only thing in the world that mattered.

“I’m sorry,” the short man said. “I made a mistake.”

“Mistake?”

A nod. “I… I did something I shouldn’t have.”

Kibum scoffed and relaxed a little. “That’s it?” he demanded as he led them away from the crowded hall and through the swinging doors leading into the kitchen. The bustle of running taps and frying pots camouflaged their conversation. Sometimes people needed more coaxing than usual. Sometimes his targets wanted more incentive than a few softly spoken compliments. He tilted his head casually at the other. “That’s what all this is about? You feel guilty about fucking a stranger—?”

A shake of the head. “N-no…”

He frowned, stopping short in his show of confidence. “S-so…? So, what then?” And in that moment, the feeling of being inadequate, of being less-than and being not good enough filled Kibum’s chest. It was an abrupt, unexpected feeling, rising and rising until it touched his throat and tightened his ribs to bursting.

“What do you mean mistake?” he asked in a low voice.

Jonghyun looked up at the other like he had many, many times before. Innumerable times. He’d tried keeping count, much earlier, and after the first fifty he’d lost his numbers like he'd lost his mind. But every time their eyes met he was struck by the same arrows he’d been trying to run away from. He was hit, again and again, perforations growing on his body with each encounter until he was nothing but a walking canvas of weapons embedded deep in his flesh.

Because even if Kibum’s eyes were the blackest of black, they still spilled warm and thick light. Like a bonfire standing up to the darkness. Like a pair of sparklers that never went out.

Jonghyun stepped closer, pinched the distance between them. Raising a hand to the other’s cheek, he let his touch be his answer.

Kibum flinched a little when he expected a slap. He’d come to foresee those after getting hit a few times by disgruntled “clients”. What greeted him instead was an affection that was too heavy, too unbearably loud. It rushed through his ears and splashed on his tongue when he remembered the way this man—this stranger who felt like anything but—had pulsed against his chest, under his breath, beneath his fingertips. He frowned at the incongruous feeling, stepping away from it and from the hand.

“I don’t know what you want,” he started, lying. It was clear as day, sharp and defined. It was clear but he turned a blind eye to it. “You still have to pay me for the hour. You’d promised you would—”

“Is that all I am to you?” the gentle eyes dilated their hurt into a mass between them, between Kibum’s cheek and the hand that now hovered like it really would slap him. “Am I nothing to you?”

“Look, man—” Kibum shook his head and moved even farther, bumping his head into one of the heavy pans suspended above a sink. “Whatever the fuck is going on in your life, I don’t want any part in it, OK?” he clarified and took a few more steps away. “This was supposed to be just a… a bit of fun, alright? It wasn’t… whatever it is you’re trying to make it into,” he denied.

“You feel nothing for me?”

Kibum wanted to hide his face when he was posed the question. Hide behind his rejection, behind a shield of his dissent. His disbelief. “Y-you know what,” he relented. “Fuck it. Keep the money if you want but, just—”

“—stay away from you?” his words were completed by a deflated voice, and Kibum felt like **he** was the one making the mistake. Like he was walking away from something he shouldn’t be walking away from.

Jonghyun nodded. “OK,” he took a step back, hand falling to his side. He ralised again in that moment that no matter how much he liked to believe otherwise, Kibum was no ideal. He was no paragon. He was no fighter, he was simply a man trying to make ends meet. He was nothing special, no matter how special he made Jonghyun feel.

“OK. I… I understand.” He tried to smile but he couldn’t. It wasn’t an expression he could make anymore. His face wouldn’t move the right way. It always ended up showing something else. Something like discontentment. With himself, with Kibum, with everything they had created. A child of their meeting and then separation. He didn’t know what to call it, what to name it; whether he would raise it, or send it out to sea to be swallowed by the waves. He didn’t know.

Yet.

When the man raised his hand again, fingers prepared, Kibum was overcome by an inexplicable sense of dread. His eyes widened and he instinctively took a step forward to stop whatever was about to happen before—

* * *

_Click_

* * *

As he strolled along the length of the starboard deck one evening, Jonghyun threw up.

His fingers gripped the railing and his head reeled while he emptied his stomach with a heave, coughing from the effort. Strings of spit and tears fell from him as he leaned out to the water.

“Rough, huh?” a deep voice nearby asked him, putting a stop to his tears. He knew what he would find behind him. **Who** he would find behind him. A steadying breath, and then he turned. _Kibum_ , he remembered the name his tongue had tasted a thousand times before. _Kim Kibum from Daegu, who liked waterskiing and cantaloupes_. He gulped at the sight.

“Y-yeah…” he nodded. “It’s my first time, so…”

“Congratulations,” Kibum said with half a smile, putting the cigarette in his mouth and puffing. “On losing your sea virginity, I mean,” he grinned. “Must be exciting?”

The man blinked at him with something between curiosity and longing. Kibum felt a little chill slide along his spine but didn’t let it show. He wanted to step closer and find out, wanted to ask his usual tired pick-up line of _have we met before?_ —but this time with a sincere need to know. The cigarette burned between his fingers, nearly forgotten. When its heat started advancing on his skin, he put it out. 

“A-ahaha… th-thank you,” the other gave a belated laugh, forced and fake. Kibum was oddly reminded of guitar strings, broken after the most beautiful serenade in the world. If he reached out, perhaps he would even touch their twirled ends.

He scoffed and looked away. “So,” he began. “What brought you to an adventure on the high seas?” he asked conversationally. “Other than the need to run away from your job and all that, of course…”

Jonghyun looked around himself, a little lost. “I’m… searching for something,” he revealed.

“Ah…” Kibum nodded. “So it’s a search of your inner self, huh?” he spat the old adage, laughing despite himself.

The other shook his head to Kibum’s surprise. A thoughtful gaze found the ground and stuck to it. “I’m looking for… happiness,” the man nodded, as if answering a question he’d posed to himself. “Real happiness.”

“And you think you’ll find it here?”

When Kibum’s tone turned skeptical, Jonghyun looked at him again. “I think so,” he admitted, his sight pointed at the other. The attention seemed to make the man shift his weight uneasily, so Jonghyun turned away once more. He looked out to the black mass of water.

“If I search hard enough. If I try hard enough…” he mumbled.

“Happiness isn’t a profession, man,” he was told. “You either find it or you don’t. You can’t go out and—” Kibum shook his head. “It’s not a treasure hunt. You can’t search for something like that. It comes to you out of nowhere. Life is like that.”

“Then…” Jonghyun redirected. “Has your happiness come to you?” he asked all of a sudden.

Kibum seemed taken aback by it. “I…” he tried. “I don’t know.”

* * *

_Click_

* * *

_“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking…”_

When they next met, it was at last call at the bar. Kibum could tell the man had drunk nothing but water all night, but when he opened his mouth the first words to greet his ears were as alarming as a series of loud explosions going off in the distance.

“You help people, don’t you? For a price?”

Kibum’s eyes widened and he hushed the other urgently. With a scowl, he leaned in. “Who was it? Did Taemin tell you? That bastard has always had a big mouth…” He made a mental note to settle the score with that guy. Sure, they were partners in this enterprise, but Kibum did all the legwork while Taemin fattened on nearly half the benefits. And to top it off, he was always causing trouble being far too candid about their after-hours activities. If any of the gossip made its way to Captain Jinki’s desk, it would undoubtedly be Kibum’s neck on the line.

The time to permanently cut Taemin out of the deal had arrived. But right now, he had bigger worries on his hands.

Jonghyun stayed quiet, stayed observing the other for a few minutes. “I’ll pay,” he nodded, taking out his wallet and making to pull a wad of notes out into the open. He didn't know what he was doing anymore. The hurt from their previous encounters hadn't healed, nor did it sting or remind him of how much it had upset him. If the anger and distress still lingered inside him, if it was waiting to rear its ugly head at the most inopportune moment, he wasn't aware of it. He didn't know if what he was doing was right. He didn't know. So he tried to stop thinking and let his heart lead him by the hand.

He let go.

Kibum stopped him, shaking his head as if to say _not here_ , before continuing to polish glasses. They remained unspeaking for some more time, watching other heavily drunk passengers be led out of the bar and to their rooms. They waited until the last set of ears stumbled away from them, before either one of them attempted a conversation again.

“Not a lot of passengers willing to pay before we do anything,” Kibum mumbled out the corner of his mouth, despite their relative solitude. “What exactly have you heard, ahjussi?”

Jonghyun moved past the insult with ease. “It’s an assurance.”

Dark eyes looked up at him and darker eyebrows rose high enough to crease Kibum’s forehead. “What, you think I’ll run away?” he scoffed. “Where can I run to when I'm just as stuck on this bloody ship? I’m not an idiot, you know—”

“You won’t run,” Jonghyun shook his head. “Not at first.”

“Why, you got some kind of weird kinks or something?” the other joked.

Jonghyun looked at him, at his sharp gaze and bow lips and empty piercing holes. He remembered the sheen of Kibum's cheeks on a starlit night. He remembered the shift of Kibum's throat when he moaned. He remembered the bite of Kibum's teeth when he grew impatient and the coldness of his tongue piercing when he grew mocking.

“Yeah,” Jonghyun whispered. “Yeah, I do.”

Kibum stiffened in his place. As long as the people who paid him for his service weren’t freaks of some sort, he managed just fine. He did well without the stress of wanting to impress. “Listen,” he began with second thoughts floating up to his lips in discouragement. “Maybe it’s better if we—”

“Don’t worry,” the strange man cut him off. “It’s nothing out of the ordinary.”

That didn’t inspire a lot of confidence in Kibum. “Well,” he smirked, trying to seem calm, trying to see if this led to anything profitable while still maintaining his guard. “Depends on what your definition of ordinary is, right?” 

“Do you… do you believe in the idea of soulmates?” the other asked, playing with some paper napkins and raising Kibum’s disquiet. “That we all have someone in this world?”

“The question shouldn’t be about belief,” Kibum answered a bit too quickly in a move to hide his apprehension. He already didn’t like where this was going. Maybe this man would be one of those easily obsessed types he ended up fighting off sometimes. “It’s about possibility,” he continued regardless. “And that’s easily answered, isn’t it? If I look up the population of the world right now, and it’s an even number—that means yeah,” he nodded and put the glass in his hold aside, casually leaning against the bar. “There must be someone out there for every single person in the world, if that’s the case, right?”

“And if it’s odd?” the man prompted. His tone was heavy and plastic, his scrutiny no more than a bolt of soft fabric. It reminded Kibum of when he was kid, and his mother let him run amok in cotton fields. He would pull the soft white ripened bolls off their stems and thow them into the air, watch them float back to his hold like falling clouds. He heard so much loneliness spilling from the man's voice, it hurt his own chest. _No one could be this sad,_ Kibum thought. _No one could be this inconsolable._

“Then it’s obvious right?’ he matched the voice in softness when he finally replied, a kindness he never offered anyone else. “Then I’m alone in this world. Strange...” he gave a soundless chuckle. “That you could be destined for great love, or for absolute misery… just because of one single number.”

“There are stranger things.”

“Like what?” a cut eyebrow rose at Jonghyun. Yet this time, the look didn’t feel as cold or unemotional. It was oddly sympathetic. Earnest. 

“Like the fact that someone like you would ever think that… that there is no one out there for him,” he said with some kindness of his own.

Kibum’s eyes swam in light when he heard that. He turned away and returned to his shift, cleaning and wiping and obviously trying his best not to look at Jonghyun again. But his glance often strayed over, often brushed against Jonghyun’s own. He didn’t try to catch the man’s attention or speak with him again, but they stayed like that, in their respective places, behind their respective barriers. Working and thinking and steeping in the saltwater that swilled around them.

Before he left the bar, Jonghyun scribbled some lines on a paper napkin, penning his thoughts and abandoning them for the other to find. 

_“I have a thousand lovers, and each one is dear to me._  
_But you touch my head, you kiss my eyes, you make me disappear._  
_And in a blink, a thousand loves become nothing.”_

* * *

_Click_

* * *

“What do you like about me?” Kibum always asks as he carries Jonghyun away to another reality. 

“Everything,” the answer is whispered. Jonghyun caresses Kibum’s waist, rolls him onto his back and straddles across him. “Everything,” he always replies in the darkness, blankets draped over them and shirt slipping off easily. “Everything.” 

“Then… what do you like about us?” Kibum murmurs, cold fingers running over golden and heated skin. 

The man rolls his hips, brushes himself against Kibum. It is his wordless answer. Nothing else needs to be said. Nothing else needs specifying, regardless of Kibum’s incessant, unsure inquiries. Jonghyun places his hands over the other’s, pushing them harder onto his flesh and muscle, onto his existence. 

“Everything.”

Kibum glows in the dark, like he isn’t of this earth. Like he is not human, but celestial. 

He turns Jonghyun into someone else too. Jonghyun changes whenever he is in Kibum’s arms. He has never been held like that. He hasn’t been touched or kissed or even called the way Kibum pronounces his name. And it makes Jonghyun realise what an island he is, how quiet his life is despite all the noise residing around him. When Kibum looks at him, when Kibum touches him, when Kibum is inside him, he isn’t Jonghyun then. He turns into someone else. He turns into someone who loves Kibum with everything he has. 

“What do you like the most about this world?” Kibum persists.

It is strange to do this. It is odd to be like this and to feel like this. The fingers in him, the slickness of their slide, the edge of a razor-like stare—everything is so strange to Jonghyun, regardless of how many times they do this. Every encounter is new and unexpected, like he’s never experienced it before. Everything Kibum does and everything it makes Jonghyun feel, it is all so strange. One minute he wants to stop and speak his mind, spill serious utterances and truthful thoughts between them. And another, he wants to never stop, never say a word, never reveal more than Kibum's assured fingertips are willing to breach.

The softness of the mattress, the brightness of the moon, the chill in the air, the stretch of his ribs. Nothing is familiar no matter how many times they meet. No single time is the same as the others. The union of their skins feels unreal. All their nights are dreams.

Panting, heated, needing, he lays on his back and locks his legs around Kibum. He looks up expectantly, waiting for him with a palm on his hipbone. “I like this world… because you live in it,” he whispers.

Kibum’s actions are always careful, gentle. He is always so deliberate when he moves. But his words are like knives. 

“And what if I didn’t?”

Jonghyun lets out a long sigh when he is finally given, when he finally receives. When Kibum is finally piercing him like the needle he is, Jonghyun coils his arms around the other’s neck. There is an unassailable need to be inseparable. A fervent yearning to speak with the same tongue, breathe with the same set of lungs, pump the same blood with the same pulsing heart. To think with the same mind and grasp with the same fingers and push the ground away with the same feet. There is a lust, to be one. To be the same person. To press against one another so hard that their skins and tendons and bones all mesh into one devoted intimate whole. One body. One being. One life. There is an emphatic desire to be one, and it lives in both. They needn’t give it voice; they needn’t even think of it when they are together in the same cramped quarters. But Jonghyun knows and Kibum knows. The desire makes itself plain, makes itself apodictic. They cannot dispute it. They cannot deny it, nor lie about its existence. It thrives within them, in the places where their bodies are joined. 

“… then I’d want to be wherever you were.”

And that satisfies Kibum. Every time he pushes in is more perfect than the last. Every time is more filling, more complete. Every time Kibum pulls him by his thighs, every time they are joined the closest, Jonghyun whispers the other’s name over and over, calls for him over and over. It is like giving himself up, like surrendering himself.

Jonghyun’s love is thick. Viscous. It is love, of this Kibum is certain. Because what else could weigh so heavily on his chest? What else could drag him down, bend him in half with its sheer mass as he lugs it in his trembling hold? 

When Jonghyun hums softly in their kisses, when his body burns from head to toe. When Jonghyun breaths in what he breaths out—what else could Kibum call it but love?

He doesn’t know for certain, he admits. He’s never experienced love before. It could be anything, really. Infatuation. Addiction. Obsession. It could be anything. He doesn’t know. But when Jonghyun laces their fingers together, gasps every time he rises and sits back down onto Kibum, when he closes his eyes and lets his head fall back. When he looks like he is trying to memorise how every slide feels… when Jonghyun murmurs Kibum’s name like it is a small prayer, it doesn’t matter what this is. Kibum doesn’t feel the need to find out. He wants to stay ignorant. He wants it to run its course though him, through his blood and bones. Like a passing disease. He wants it to take over his every cell, corrupt it, and then let go of him when it has done irreversible damage. 

He wants this fever, wants this calenture that no one can detect until it has claimed too much of him.

This man, his front against a wall and his arm hooked backwards onto Kibum’s neck. This man with arched back and heavy arousal—whoever he is and whatever is in his heart, Kibum doesn’t want to dig in and find out. He doesn't want to look for answers, he doesn't want to ask for explanations, he doesn't want to follow his suspicions and uncover clues that will break the dream. He doesn't want to wake up from this. He doesn't want the desolation of reality. All he wants is Jonghyun’s silken body shuddering against him. All he wants is the breaking voice moaning for him. _Kibum, Kibum, Kibum._ All he wants is to keep hearing that grating and irreverent keen.

He wants nothing but that golden sound claiming his name.

He wants nothing but those short golden fingers clutching his hair.

He wants nothing but that golden stare boring into his chest.

He wants nothing but the wild pulsing heat around his yearning.

He wants nothing more than to bury himself into the man, to stay there eternally, to live in him, to make a house of him. 

He wants nothing but Jonghyun.

* * *

_Click_

* * *

There was no more space left in the ashtray sitting on the side table. Kibum had smoked his whole night away into it. Stuffed it to its overflowing crystal rim.

Jonghyun studied it as he moved, feeling as full as the dish. He was the same as all those cigarettes: not fully burned out, not completely sizzled to nothing. Pieces of him sat over other bent and pressed pieces. Stamped silent or pinched quiet or. Or spat on, in an empty paper cup held in an empty alleyway—shared with no one else but still never fully his own.

He had wanted everything. He had wanted the stars, the sea. He had wanted the moon. He had wanted it all, and as Kibum’s labored grunts lapped against his shore like waves, he knew the other had tried his hardest to give him all of it. He had tried through every cold night. He had tried on some damp mornings too, blindly gathering the whole sky to load it into Jonghyun’s awaiting lap. He’d tried with his hands, his mouth, his hips. He had tried with all his might.

He had tried hard enough to shake them. To shatter them. Drown them. He had tried hard enough to turn the ship upside down. Over and over they had become submerged under the weight of Jonghyun’s desire for everything. 

He hadn’t let Kibum rest. He had voiced his demands clearly. He had begged for it—scratched the other’s pale back and pulled at his midnight hair and bitten at his sturdy shoulders. He had pronounced his hunger with every word in every language he knew. And Kibum had listened. He had tried.

But Jonghyun wanted too much. 

He was full. Of himself, of Kibum, of his thoughts, of the nights burnt away into coils of smoke. He carried his story, his truth, like carrying a child. His belly was bursting at the seams. His insides were roiling to be born. To bring the truth out into the world would be like a labour. To give it birth from within his heavy body, to hold it up in the air for Kibum to see... he didn't want that. But he was full like the ashtray in his vision, and he knew this wasn’t a feeling he wanted either. 

This was not what they were meant for. This was not love. This was not their story. This was a nightmare that repeated itself because Jonghyun had forgotten how to move forward; **when** to move forward. They were stuck until he let go. They were stuck, tapping their feet and clicking their fingers, dancing and looping around each other’s forms in an attempt to follow a rhythm that kept evading them. They were slaves to a second hand that constantly raced ahead, besting them at their own game. 

The embers on Kibum’s fingertips glowed as if still fresh. They burned into Jonghyun’s waist, into the flesh of his hips. No matter how good the touch felt, no matter how ecstatic the burn made Jonghyun feel, this wasn’t where they belonged. This was not how they fit together. This wasn’t their song and these weren’t their words. This was not how the story should've ended. This wasn’t their place. They were both equally and tragically wrong. 

This was a mistake.

There was an unassailable need to be inseparable. But some hours days months later when Jonghyun pulled and Kibum pushed, they realized this wasn’t right. In the pushing and pulling they had sawed through their connection until it broke and came apart into two seperate pieces. 

“We need to stop,” Kibum said to him one afternoon when, unbeknownst to him, they once again stood facing each other in the steamy laundry. They had come full circle. They had started from nothing only to arrive at more nothing. “We… it’s time we stopped,” he nodded in a show of confidence he clearly did not feel.

Jonghyun had no more fight left in him. He quietly stood and listened to his regret reflected back at him.

* * *

_Click_

* * *

“I think… I think in a previous life, I used to be a terrible person,” Jonghyun admitted to Kibum one night. The wind bellowed and the ship swung, but the banquet halls were filled with celebration and alcohol. They’d ducked in here, into an empty theatre, to hide their exchange.

“I think I was an awful human being once,” Jonghyun continued to a silent and appraising Kibum. “And this is the universe’s way of punishing me.” He really believed it too. Everything that had been taken away from him, on this cruise, on this sea, on this planet—every little subtraction from his life was a direct result of his own actions, if not in this life, then in another.

“All the happiness taken from me… it must have a place it ends up in. It must go to someone else,” he whispered up to Kibum, closing the distance between them. “I want that someone else to be you,” he nodded. “I want all the happiness I lost to become yours. I want the universe to find its balance like that.” He took hold of Kibum’s frowning and confused face.

“Because your happiness is my happiness. I want that for you. Forever.”

“Nothing is forever,” Kibum replied to the short man, speaking despite his disordered feelings.

The other nodded, but still didn’t let go. “I know. I know… I thought it could be. I thought if I tried to make this last, there could be a forever. But…” a despondent smile went on. “But nothing lasts. Everything ends.”

“So—so where does that leave us?” Kibum continued to ask. “Where does it leave you?”

“On a boat,” the man murmured. “Headed nowhere… unless,” he looked up with some hope.

“Unless?”

The short man’s breath slowly grew urgent. The ship groaned, lurching hard towards port. As they hobbled towards the nearest support and waited through their wobbling stances, a loud crash resounded somewhere overhead.

“Get off the ship with me,” Jonghyun urged.

Kibum is neither here, nor there. He does not belong to any one point. He does not dock at any single port. He does not go home at the end of the trail—he has no home, no trail; he has no destination. He is idling footsteps on a dusty road in the middle of nowhere. Or the middle of somewhere that does not have a name. He is the ship and he is the journey. He is the cruise they were on, are on, the cruise they will go on, all the way until eternity. He is endless.

“Get off the ship with me,” Jonghyun asks him several times, only to be given the same answer again and again.

“I have nowhere else to go.”

Kibum is neither now, nor then. Time does not bind him, even if it moves and ages him. He is everlasting.

He is not a tourist. He has no camera around his neck, no passport in his front pocket, no maps in his cargo pants. He is not a tourist, but he is no host, either. He has no room for guests, no place for visitors. He goes, but he does not stay. He does not stop.

He is not a traveler, he is the travel. He is the milestone, he is the arrows of directions, he is the distance marker. He is the welcome mat at the front door, the tinkling bell hanging above it. He is the bowl of tips left for good service. He is the elevator music. He is the buffering circle on the screen. He is the intermediate. He is the stuck second hand in the old wristwatch, the water-damage on a digital screen. He is the equator that splits a planet in half and the midway that bisects its length. He is longitudes and latitudes, degrees and inches. He is the lee shore and the windward. He is the beach and the breeze. He is the abandoned lighthouse in the distance, still casting from its lamp, still guiding those looking. He is both. He is neither.

“Get off this ship with me,” Jonghyun begs. “Please, just come with me.”

“I have nowhere else to go.”

No, Kibum has no home. 

But if he did, it would’ve wept. Empty. Bereft of his breath. Incomplete without his touch. If he had a home it would’ve called for him, begged for him, pleaded him to return into its walls and closed them around him like it would never let him go. Like they were arms. If Kibum had a place to return to, an address to go back to, he would’ve never left it. He would’ve stayed there, sandwiched between low ceiling and warm floor. If he had a home he’d never even dream of leaving its uneven risers and chipping paint. If Kibum had a home, and if the home were real, he would not be here right now. He would not have a life on the sea, would not be sailing like this was his home. This cold stretch of blue and grey, in the open, in the wind. He wouldn’t be floating with nowhere for his feet to land.

“Get off this ship with me,” Jonghyun weeps when the ship begins to capsize.

“I—I have nowhere else to go!”

If Kibum had a home it would be Jonghyun. 

But like Jonghyun, Kibum is and he also isn’t. He is the in-between. He lives after the start and before the end. He is the middle. He is nowhere that Jonghyun can point to, no place he can touch with his fingertips. 

So he clicks them together, instead.

* * *

_Click_

* * *

As he strolled along the length of the starboard deck one evening, Jonghyun threw up.

His fingers gripped the railing and his throat gasped while he emptied his stomach with a heave, ending in a pained cry. Strings of spit and tears fell from him as he leaned out to the water.

“Rough, huh?” Kibum asked him like he had a thousand times before, and Jonghyun felt the sudden urge to ask him to go away, to get out of his sight. This wasn’t something he wanted to keep up anymore. This wasn’t a place or a time he wanted to stay in anymore. He shook his head and sobbed in place.

“Please…” he begged of the man. “Stop…”

The sight of a grown man crying should look pitiful. Pathetic. Kibum would’ve scoffed and continued on his way.

But he didn’t. Not this time. This time, the whimpering shadow kept him glued to his spot, as if it were a spectacle. For some reason he couldn’t explain or give a name to, he wanted to be there. He wanted to keep watching. He wanted to stand absolutely still and let his cigarette burn towards his fingers until it left a char mark on the skin of his knuckles.

Because this man wasn’t pitiful. He wasn’t pathetic. He was like a falling star that never reached the ground. Every sharp inhale going into and racking his small frame repeated the same unspoken words over and over— _help me_ , it begged. _Help me, someone please help me_.

Kibum wasn’t just an onlooker anymore, he realized then. He wasn’t an innocent bystander. Whatever happened from this point onward to this sad man, whatever fate decided for him, Kibum was no longer an outsider to it.

He had become an unwilling accomplice.

Jonghyun slowly turned to check if he was alone, and when he found Kibum still staring, he continued to weep.

“Just go,” he urged. “This... shit will never end if you stay.” It was the truth, they would keep running in these meaningless circles without pause unless one of them stopped. And since Jonghyun wasn't willing to stop, all he could do was resort to begging. “Please go. Go now.”

The words didn’t fully register in his head. Kibum remained frozen, remained staring. He remained as if like a helpless statue. They'd had distressed passengers before. They'd had to make an emergency stop to offload people like that, send them to safety. But something told him this man wasn't quite the same. He didn't want to go anywhere. He wanted to stay right where he was.

“W-will you be alright, sir?” he asked.

The concern only worked to bolster Jonghyun’s misery. He stood and made to jump. He swung his leg over the railing and began shifting his weight off the ground before two pairs of hands yanked him back. He fell to the ground, cushioned by a familiar body, surrounded by familiar arms, catching a familiar scent. Shaking his head, trying to free himself, he felt the hold tighten around him like a vice.

“Sir—sir, please stop! You…! Stop, you can’t do this—!” Kibum warned him, wrestling them around on the cold deck.

“Let me—let me go!” Jonghyun fought back. “Let me go, I need to—I need to end this!”

Kibum’s embrace grew more rigid. “End what?!” he demanded angrily.

* * *

_“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking…”_

Jonghyun didn’t know why Kibum was in his cabin. There was nothing to tie them together anymore. There was nothing between them this time except apprehension and air. They sat several feet apart, one’s eyes watchful while the other’s strayed all over his surroundings.

“Why were you trying to jump?” Kibum’s voice was soft, unbearably so. He’d heard that tone so many times before when they’d shared a bed, a pillow, a night. He'd heard it often enough that he knew it didn't come from a place of concern or pity. It was no more than morbid curiosity, Jonghyun knew Kibum well enough to accuse him of it.

“I don’t want to be on this ship anymore,” Jonghyun readily answered. “I… I want to get off. I want to go home.”

Kibum’s face assumed a tiredness. “We all do…” he mumbled. “Sir,” he tried again with more formality. “We’re a little less than two weeks away from Singapore anyway. I’m… I’m sure our services aren’t so bad that you’d want to jump overboard?” he joked in an obvious attempt to cheer Jonghyun up.

But it had no effect on him. It didn't work. Nothing worked. All he wanted was to walk over and wrap himself around Kibum's torso; to plead with the man and shake him until he gave in. All he wanted was that, but how could he? How could he, when they were nothing to each other? When he was no more than a passenger on a ship, and Kibum was no more than the journey that never ended? Jonghyun fought the urge to cry. He shook his head and stood, turning away from the other.

“Please leave,” he waved dismissively. “I won’t try to jump again, OK? So **please** —” he said with some force.

“Of course, sir,” Kibum gave his clipped answer. They weren’t allowed to be rude to the customers, and even if he didn’t care about the repercussions, he was in no mood to deal with a crabby old man. 

Regardless, the odd guy stayed in his mind for the rest of the day. He would think of him as he poured someone a drink or held out a chair for an old lady, or even as he helped a young couple by taking their fussy baby on a stroll. Kibum would think of him when he tried flirting with a rich woman who seemed a little confused about the date and constantly asked him to remind her. He’d never felt like this about anyone else. He’d never felt so... responsible for anyone else. It was baffling, and he wondered if he knew the man from a previous cruise.

Their encounters must have left a magnet in Jonghyun’s brain. He found Kibum no matter how far out of his way he went to avoid the other. 

He did all the things he normally hated doing. He stayed in the pool for hours, slowly turning into a prune, roasting the skin of his arms in the sun. He attended the dancing events, holding hands with his ghost partner and moving quietly within the mass of staring couples. He ate at the bar during sporting events, being jostled by rowdy foreign men and numbing himself with alcohol. He even went to a cabaret performance at the most expensive restaurant aboard, watching the feathery dancers with no amusement or excitement.

There were several busy places on the ship, where a small and unassuming man like him could use to disappear.

But Kibum was always there, always lurking. Their eyes wouldn’t always meet. Their faces wouldn’t always turn towards each other, but to his frustration Kibum was always there. Like a watchdog. Like a silent spy. Like an assassin creeping closer and closer every minute, approaching his ultimate target—Jonghyun’s hopelessness.

Regardless, he tried to hide himself, going as far as sneaking into the cargo bay one hot afternoon until Kibum himself discovered him squatting between two large wooden crates.

“What the hell?!” the other demanded incredulously before he began yanking Jonghyun up by his resisting arms. “What’re you doing here?! You could’ve been crushed!” 

“Stop following me!” Jonghyun spat his indignation.

Kibum had had enough by that point. He wasn’t going to let this guy be an idiot. “Listen man, I don’t know what your fucking problem is, OK? But you need to stop being so stupid or you’ll hurt yourself,” he explained. “Now. There’s a therapist on the staff roster, so if you want to see her—”

“I’m not crazy!”

Kibum frowned in contention. “No one is calling you crazy, calm down!” He let go of the other when he continued to struggle out of his grip. “But you’re obviously not feeling well if you keep trying to get killed.”

“I just want to go home,” the man repeated, but this time it sounded like a plea. He reached for the front of Kibum’s uniform, his fists bunching up the shirt. “Please… just let me go home. I don’t want to be here anymore—” he shook his head. His eyes were full of pain, his voice dripped with melancholy. What horrible things could've happened to this man for him to lose heart like this?

Kibum watched in stunned silence until his radio crackled. “Uhh…” he blinked out of his bewilderment and stepped away from the other’s hold. “Sorry, I have to go back up now, but you need to come with me, alright?” he tucked his shirt into his shorts and spoke with what he deemed was his kindest tone. “I-if you do,” he continued. “If you do, I promise I’ll help you look for a way home.” He tilted his head and held a hand out for the other. “What do you say?”

  
Jonghyun had never known Kibum to lie about anything. In all their time together, he had trusted the man, sometimes even hung off his every word. He had no reason to question Kibum's intentions. So he followed the socked legs up several series of ladders until they were back in the open air. 

He looked out to the railing, to the place they had met once and then a thousand times. Kibum’s fingers tightened on his palm when he followed his gaze, carefully nudging them to stand closer as several rows of guests lined up to make their way back inside. 

The captain’s voice rang out in the air when the wind allowed it to. His handsome face was a distant memory in Jonghyun’s head, like they had met in a different century. He gave a little laugh at that, despite himself. The storm was not here, not yet. But it would come. It would take them, soon. It would scoop Jonghyun into its large fist and shake him around until nothing was left of him except his unfulfilled desires and his unobtained happiness.

“What?” he was asked in a concerned whisper.

Jonghyun shook his head at his shoes, and neither of them continued to talk then. But what Kibum didn’t say, Jonghyun heard. What Kibum didn’t show Jonghyun dreamt. He wanted to leave but he also wanted to stay. He wanted to erase the past but he also never wanted to live the future. He wanted to get off the ship and go home. But he also wanted to never return to being utterly alone. 

When the line started to recede into the mass of the ship, Kibum tugged him to follow. Jonghyun turned around to stare at the port deck for a few feet before pulling them to a stop.

“Listen,” he requested. “Listen. I’ll… I’ll do as you say,” he nodded. “I’ll do anything you want. But first—” he nodded, trying to sound as coherent as he could to convince the other, when contrasted with his recent behaviour. “Let's talk. Please.”

Kibum's expression seemed to wage a battle of indecision before he looked around them and grudgingly accepted. 

* * *

They sat in a couple of reclining chairs along the indoor pool. No one else was around at this time of night, besides some security guards and a few drunk teens who had snuck out from under supervising eyes, yelling until they were all escorted out. Kibum had let them in with a hurriedly keyed number sequence, shuffling them along and holding a finger to his lips until he was sure they wouldn't be discovered.

Everything was calm. Everything was as it should have always been from the very start.

"How old are you?" Kibum started the conversation in an obvious attempt to ease into the situation.

"Thirty," Jonghyun lied. He didn't mean to; it was simply what he knew his age was supposed to be in that moment. He could've been forty, or even fifty. He could've been twenty. He didn't know. Time wasn't his strong suit. He had only ever been able to change what he could reach and physically hold with his hands. The rest was out of his control.

Kibum seemed to disagree with the answer but said nothing beyond a, "so you're a hyung, then."

"You don't have to call me that," he was told with a wavering smile. "My name is Jonghyun," he said. "But you can call me whatever you like."

Kibum snorted. "Really?" he asked. "Anything at all? What if... what if I called you a grapefruit?"

"A grapefruit?" Jonghyun giggled, losing the weights holding his shoulders down. "Why?" 

The other shrugged. "You said it could be anything."

This was what he had wanted. This was what he had been working towards. He wanted to believe this was the result of all his suffering. To have Kibum look at him with more than calculation. To have him see Jonghyun, not just notice him but study him. Like this, without reason. This was what he'd wanted—at first this had been about fixing things. It had been about apologising for himself, about mending the bridge before abandoning it. At first it had been a desperate attempt to stop feeling guilty and shitty and responsible for ruining things. At first it had been just that.

But Kibum had watered it, nurtured it and let it grow inside Jonghyun until he coughed out petals and leaves. Until his feet took root and his hands rose out to the moonlight: twisting, turning, coiling his feelings around like water. Kibum tended to him until Jonghyun lived on the other's exhales, on their mistiness and the fog of nicotine that hung off of them. At first it had been about being decent until all his decency was tarnished by onyx eyes roving over him. Now this was about them—not to fix things, not to make them right, not to correct his errors. He’d stopped trying to convince himself of those delusions. This wasn’t about any of that. This was about sitting here and doing nothing. Going nowhere. Planning for nothing. This was what Jonghyun wanted.

How could he explain that to Kibum? How could he say that to someone who looked at him like he was a stranger?

So he received what he was given, with gratitude. And he left it at that.

Kibum was stunned by how easy this was—being himself. 

He hadn't been himself in a while. A very long while. He'd been an employee of the Southern Starship. He'd been a bellboy, a waiter, a cleaner, a cook. He’d been a toy, a distraction, an entertainer, an amusement. He had been everything but himself. Kim Kibum. This stranger had done nothing out of the ordinary, and yet Kibum found himself slipping farther and farther from his usual vigilance. He felt like he could breathe deeper than before, smile wider and speak more sincerely than he had since he left land for a career on the seas. 

It shocked him, as they sat in front of each other and spoke for speaking's sake. It shocked him how good it felt to see the other smile, to hear him talk, to notice how his hand covered his eyes when he got excited, to watch his nose scrunch when Kibum cracked a dumb joke. It shocked him to realise that he didn't want to leave this moment, this series of minutes they had together, this little portion of time that didn’t seem to move. It shocked him even more how he wanted to go closer, wanted to reach out and touch the other’s face. **He** did. Not the compulsion of a side-hustle, not the fear of poverty, not the lure of boredom. He wanted to do it, to be close and stay close.

When Jonghyun brought them back to his room later, and presented Kibum with a little melody on his guitar, it was easier to play. The strings didn’t hurt, the notes didn’t sadden. He didn’t even need to write down the words. They came effortlessly to him. Like they had been waiting to fall from him, waiting for gravity to pull them out and away from their place. Like it was their fate to be sung by him.

This time was not his time. This attempt was not his attempt. This jump was not his jump. It wasn’t for his sake, or for the sake of soothing his contrition. This time was their time—his and Kibum’s. They shared ownership of it. Even if Jonghyun had been alone in clicking his fingers, even if he’d arrived here by himself, he hadn’t really been alone. He’d carried Kibum with him. Maybe not all of him... maybe it had only been the dimple in his cheek, or the sleepiness of his eyes. Maybe it had been his accidental slips of Gyeongsang satoori, or his loud guffaws, or his gravelly voice, or the bead of metal on his tongue. Maybe it had been everything Kibum had given him, everything he had placed inside Jonghyun all those other times, everything he had left behind when they were one.

“Then…” he was asked once the guitar fell silent and the air between them glowed with the warmth of many hours spent together. “What should I call you?”

Kibum blinked hesitantly. “I guess… I guess you can call me whatever you want, too,” he allowed.

The other hummed. “What do your friends call you?” 

Kibum made a face. He didn’t really have any friends, but that was something he didn’t want to divulge. Not to this man and his compassion. “Nothing nice, I’ll say that much,” he admitted sheepishly.

A pair of thoughtful eyes looked him up and down. He rearranged himself, nearly pulled out his phone to check his appearance, nearly asked if there was something wrong with his face.

Then the man smiled. “What should I call you so you’ll come talk to me again?”

Kibum raised his eyebrows calmly but anticipation swelled in him like a strange tidal wave growing out of nowhere. “You want to see me again?” he asked.

The man named Jonghyun smiled wider, all his previous dejection having magically sloughed off in the matter of a few minutes; in the exchange of some meaningless and weightless banter. “Would you be OK with that?”

Kibum nodded without a thought.

* * *

He was a quiet man, the poet.

Perhaps his words were reserved for his work, all spent on the lines and spaces that spilled from his large heart. Perhaps they dangled from his sleeves, oscillating every time he moved and hitting the people around him with each too-wide motion.

He was a quiet man, but when he opened his mouth sometimes, verses would fall from his tongue by accident. A sorry excuse for conversations that hid the stars and the sky in them. And love.

He wore his heart around his wrists like handcuffs, wore his eyes on his ears, wore his tongue with softness; with gentle whorls of vowels and soft velvet consonants. He was a quiet man, but when he spoke, he spoke with a yearning that resonated through the ground. Like a shallow earthquake that rumbled and rolled. A sleeping giant, just below his feet.

He was a quiet man, and his words built mountains and valleys in their wake. 

He was a quiet man, the poet. But even his silences gave him away. His sighs rushed out like sentences, once loud and clear, once whispered with want, once murmured with pining. Even his quiet was verbal, vocal, audible. On nights when the the ship was battered by stormy waves—on nights when a typhoon raged inside his own head—Kibum listened as he lay next to the man, watching him breathe his wordless songs and his hushed stories. He tried to touch their meanings with his fingertips but failed, unable to live on the same dimension or in the same reality as the other.

But he didn’t give up. He still tried. To understand, to grasp, to fathom the unspoken speech. To reveal its secrets to himself.

He was a quiet man—this poet. Hiding his vocabulary in the day and walking the ship at night, leaving a word or two in his wake. A lament or a dirge. A cry of helplessness in exchange for a few rays of moonlight. His golden hands would collect it to his chest. They would hold wet drops of silver there like slippery mercury threatening to fall out of his unsteady grip and fall onto the ground. He would treasure it, his little stash of silver borrowed from the sky. It crackled in his pockets when he moved; crackled in his eyes when he looked at Kibum. It danced when their sights met: softly, gently, shyly, but spilling yearnings of the night like they were tears.

He walked the ship through his sleepless nights, this quiet poet, and looked for what he could find as solace. Maybe this was why they had met. Maybe this was why he had chosen Kibum—as a substitute for the absent moon. Maybe he’d mistaken Kibum’s coldness for the usual frigid ball of nighttime. Maybe the poet hadn’t been thinking right when they first chanced on each other.

He was a quiet man, the poet. He would crouch on the ground and drink the moon from puddles, taste it on glass and inhale it from the air. He would bathe in it. It was his sustenance, his nourishment. He thrived off of it, this was undeniable. It was his lifeblood and Kibum could never be a good replacement.

He was a quiet man, the poet. A strange man. A man not of this reality. A man not made of the same bone and muscle that Kibum was built from. Stories, not blood flowed through the poet’s veins. His joints were rhyme and his skin was ink. He was not from this generation, not from this era. And he would not be bound by it: this was clear to Kibum as he stared at the peaceful sleeping form of the man. Time did not make him bow to its burden. Age came to him, but with hesitance. He was not like the rest of them, living a linear life and walking a straight path. He wandered, meandered like a river. He was not like the rest of the the world, he was something else entirely. He couldn’t be compared or measured against any of the usual comparisons or measurements. He was his own.

He was not like the rest of them, waking up before the sun, in the minutes they shared and the ones they didn’t. He would rise on his elbows, kissing the crescent of the sky, taking it in his mouth and swallowing it whole to hide it beside his unspoken words. And on dark nights, when he would find only Kibum next to him, he would kiss the crescent of lips instead. All hesitancy was forgotten, nothing remained forbidden between them.

He was a quiet man—the poet. And the moon sat pressed under his tongue like a secret in the mornings. He rolled it against his teeth, crunched it between his jaw, then made it whole again when he wrote of it. Recreated it to perfection for the skies, throwing it out above his head to the place he stared at from his elbows.  
  
Kibum watched from the distance, and then watched from the circle of arms that would trap him in them, hold him captive by his mind and his limbs. He watched as he tasted the muted navel and the hushed thighs. He watched as he pulled at the stifled moans and smothered yelps that called for him. He watched for what felt like a lifetime and even then he couldn’t understand what he was looking at. What was this man? What was this poet? What was this peculiar creature that worshipped Kibum the way he worshipped his beloved moon, with the same ardor?

He was a quiet man, the poet. And Kibum was always afraid that one day he would disappear.

“What is your dream?” the mad and sweet and maddeningly sweet poet asked once.

Kibum scoffed. “Dream? Hah. I’m not a kid anymore,” he emphasized as he pulled his suspenders over his shoulders and buttoned his collar.

“You can still dream,” a shrug replied.

He thought about what to say to that, how to answer something he had stopped thinking about many years ago. He could always lie and say he didn’t remember or lie and make something up. But the expectation in hazel eyes stopped him.

“A home,” he finally revealed, clipping on his bowtie. “One of my own.”

“What kind of home?” he was indulged.

He raised his eyebrows. “You really want to know?”

A nod and a smile. “Tell me.”

And Kibum did. He related his vision of a house on a hill, meeting none of the expected dimensions, morphing in appearance from one angle to another, changing facades from a maze in the north to a temple in the south. He spoke of his dream like he was readying himself to build his chameleon home just then, in those moments. He spoke like he was about to take up a spade and start digging for the foundations, start breaking rock and lining the roof. He spoke like it would all somehow come true if he told the other, the poet, the magician of words who could perhaps make it all come true.

* * *

When the ship rocked, it rocked hard.

It swayed like a cloth hanging out on the drying line. There was no controlling it, there was no saving it before it came loose and fluttered away in the powerful wind. The sound of crashing glass was in the air before the panicked screams. The sound of scraping furniture was camouflaged by loud alarms blaring overhead. The sound of Jonghyun’s thoughts was thundering compared to the waves lashing against their doomed vessel.

He caught Kibum’s eye just as a chandelier plummeted to the dance floor. It shattered into little fragments before sliding across to hit a wall. The world was falling apart as they crouched under the tables, waiting for it to fold over them like the pages of a book. The world was slowly disappearing. The world was becoming nothing beyond the threat of speeding water and rushing death. He caught Kibum’s eye and they both knew in that moment what they didn’t want to leave the moment. They wanted it to never end. They wanted to stretch forever, like an elastic band that wouldn’t break no matter how many times they’d pull it across the breadth of each sea and every continent. He caught Kibum’s eye and Kibum returned the favor, snagging Jonghyun’s vision and rolling it in a net of defiance true to his name—defiance against the end of everything they knew.

“Come with me,” he ran over and started to pull Jonghyun to his feet, dragging him along. They cut between panicking masses of bodies being flung to and fro like ragdolls, hanging onto their lives with all their might. 

“Where will we go?” Jonghyun put a hand over the fingers clasping his bicep, but he didn’t try to stop them. He didn’t try to change fate, not yet. That would come later, at the absolute end. “Where could we be safe?” 

They shared a look at that, and although Kibum didn’t say anything it was clear he didn’t have any answer. Were it up to him, they would go down into the water that night. But he didn’t say anything, he didn’t want it to end like that. Instead, he took them out of the banquet hall and rushed to immediate safety. He rushed, his shoes slipping over the floor of the passages that connected the guest cabins.

When they found Jonghyun’s door, he pulled them in and locked the door behind them. “Let’s stay here,” he assured in a voice that held no assurance. “Let’s… let’s be here until things calm down.”

“And what if things never calm down?” Jonghyun questioned. He seemed resigned about all this. He seemed oddly unfazed, like he didn’t fear death. Like he had lived through perilous situations like this several times before and survived. 

Like he was invincible.

Kibum’s visible disquiet was only a reassurance to Jonghyun. Serene and collected, he took a seat on the edge of his bed to watch the man fret a while at the door before taking a deep breath and muttering under his breath.

“Is that a prayer?” Jonghyun observed with a little gloom. “I didn’t think you were a religious man.”

“Desperate times, right?” Kibum tried to maintain his good humor but his façade was quickly unraveling. “Everyone becomes a devout man when they know they’re fucked. All we can do is hope Jinki is worth his salt. He’s our god now!” he gave an empty chuckle and eventually claimed the empty seat in front of the dresser.

Jonghyun considered him like he had a thousand times. He read Kibum’s unspoken fears and tacit anxiety. He reached out and took hold of the man’s most repressed emotions, caressing them between his hands and watching them with adoration like he were considering a lovable and defenseless child. 

Kibum stared up at him through a shield of worry.

“Should I save us?” Jonghyun whispered down to him, hugging the other’s confused face to his stomach. “Should I take us out of here like I did last time?”

“W-what—?” Kibum pushed away from him, his apprehension replaced by puzzlement. “Hey, what do you mean?” he demanded, some hope shining in his perpetually dark eyes. “Eh? Do you know a way out of this?”

Jonghyun nodded, caressing Kibum’s ears. “A way. But when we leave, we won’t be us anymore,” he shook his head, already feeling his hopelessness win out. “You won’t be the same. And Jinki won’t be the same. Taemin won’t be the same,” he sighed and crouched in to kiss Kibum’s deepened frown. “Nothing will be the same. Only I will be left behind. That’s the way out.”

  
Kibum felt an old horror climb up to his throat, like the sudden realization that there was something worse than death. Like there was something worse than drowning. He gripped Jonghyun’s hands on his face, holding them tightly in place. “No,” he denied as if he knew what he was denying. “No. Not that…” he gulped. “Fuck… anything but that. There has to be a way that’s not—”

“There isn’t,” Jonghyun answered, freeing his hand despite Kibum’s best efforts to restrain him. “There’s no other answer. This is all I can do to save you... every single time. This is how it’ll always end, there's no way out.”

“No,” Kibum’s eyes widened in fright. “No no no no...!” he pleaded as he watched the other take a deep breath and close his eyes when everything— 

* * *

_Click_

* * *

As he strolled along the length of the starboard deck one evening, Jonghyun threw up.

His fingers gripped the sides of his head, quaking in shock and grief, while he emptied his stomach with a heave. He wept as he tried to crawl away from the place, not wanting to wait and hear—

“Is everything alright, sir?” a strange, unfamiliar voice called to him. He turned to look at its owner and shook his head in disbelief.

 _Not Kibum_ , he realized in his shock. _He’s not Kibum_. Jonghyun touched his forehead. Had he done something different this time? Had he unknowingly changed something to cause this difference? Had the shift backwards been altered by some other factor outside of his control? Or... or had he split out of his own timeline somehow and made it so nothing was the same this time around? Not just this ship, but the whole world? 

“Where…?” he fearfully began asking the stranger. “Where is he? Where’s Kibum? Why isn’t he here?”

Taemin raised an eyebrow in question. “Ah…” he nodded in a low voice. “You’re one of his uhh… patrons, are you?”

The man remained quiet for a long while. He looked stunned. Maybe he’d hit is head somewhere. The tides had been rough for the past couple of hours. This kind of weather always caused accidents.

“N-no,” the answer finally came. “No. I’m—I’m just a friend of his,” a series of nods tried reinforcing the words. The weren’t very convincing. “I… I was supposed to meet him here. For a smoke, you know?”

“Really?” the other mused. “I thought he was trying to quit…”

“He… he is,” Jonghyun nodded. “I’m helping with that. I—I’m a therapist, you see,” he lied.

Taemin pursed his lips before nodding. “Sure,” he accepted for show. “Uhm. He’s on kitchen duty tonight. Then he’s bartending in the lounge till two in the morning,” he recited from memory. It came with needing to help the asshole with his extra-curricular shit.

“O-oh,” a perplexed sigh replied. “Right… sorry.”

After watching the man for some more time, Taemin relented and approached. “He’s on a fifteen-minute break at midnight,” he shared. “Go see him then.”

The man’s eyes grew large with hope.

“Th-thank you,” Jonghyun nodded and started to stand up. “Thank you. I’ll—I’ll be sure to check in on him then.”

“Uh huh,” the stranger smirked. “You do that.”

They stood facing each other for a while, gazes shifting awkwardly and hands fiddling with clothes or hair or watches. Jonghyun didn’t know what more he could add to the conversation and it seemed neither did the other.

“Y-you’re a friend of his too, then?” he asked to break the uneasy silence.

“Well,” the other shrugged. “He doesn’t keep a lot of friends, so...”

The short man looked sad at that. “Yeah,” he nodded. “Yeah, I always hated that about him.”

* * *

_“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking,”_ Jinki spoke over his head as Jonghyun jogged through hallways and passages in his search. _“We are nearing the coast of Singapore in a few hours, and the weather is looking to be on our side—”_

He came to a halt and stared at the nearest PA speaker. If the shift hadn’t taken him back two weeks… something had definitely changed with this world. Something had caused **it** to shift instead, and it was impossible for Jonghyun to tell what the cause could be. There were a million variables, a billion different factors that made time travel possible for an entity like him. A slight alteration in any one of those million, billion somethings could redefine his reality and lock him out of his original timeline forever. 

He shuddered, leaning his shoulder against a wall in the narrow passageway. This was unprecedented. This had never happened to him. Even as his fingers itched to click and take him out of this mess like they always did, he didn’t know if there was a way out of this. He didn’t know if there was an escape this time.

 _“Please enjoy the sun and do let the crew know if they can make your stay with us more comfortable,”_ Jinki’s familiar warm voice continued to drown out his thoughts. _“Thank you for choosing the Southern Starship. On behalf of all the crew, I wish you safety on the rest of your journey.”_

If Jinki still existed, and Taemin still existed and Kibum still existed… what had changed? How much of them was still the same? Did Kibum still have the same eyes and hands and lips and voice? Did he have the same scars and the same habits and even the same dreams? Did he still feel strong and magnetic when he moved? Was he still quiet and mysterious when he spoke? Was he still soft and gentle when he loved?

Kibum raised his eyebrow at the man, washed in sweat and huffing as if he’d run a marathon. “Ahjussi…” he began in cynical tone. “Are you alright?”

The short and winded man laughed, but he didn’t seem mad and he didn’t look lost. He looked like he had come there with a purpose, an intelligent light gleaming in his golden-brown eyes. “Listen,” he began when he’d caught his breath, and Kibum didn’t feel his usual need to look at his watch as if to check the time. He truly wanted to be there then, something in his gut told him this was important. He wanted to listen.

“Listen,” the man gulped his inhale. “One life is not enough. One job and one dream is not enough. We always want more. We’re wired to never be satisfied,” he shook his head, but he kept his smile. “We always want more.”

“O…K?” Kibum reconsidered his first instinct and looked around himself for safety. If this guy was going to speak gibberish to him, then—

“Yah, Kim Kibum!” the man surprised him by yelling out loud.

He frowned. He didn’t remember giving his name. “A-ahjussi… do we know each othe—?”

He was given an exasperated sigh in response.

“Pay attention, will you?” Jonghyun demanded. “What I’m saying is. Nothing will ever be enough. So don’t think too much. Don’t wait for a sign. There isn't going be a sign. Leave this ship. Leave this life behind, if that's really what you want.”

Kibum stood stunned for a moment before letting go of a ridiculing scoff. “All this bullshit… did Taemin put you up to this? Eh? That joker, always doing something useless...” he shook his head and started to walk away.

Jonghyun didn’t give up. “No, listen to me. Listen, will you—?!” he started to pull the other back when he was shrugged off with force.

“Ah, let me go, alright? Fucking weirdo...” Kibum glared. “Who the fuck are you to say all this to me anyway? Don’t pretend to know who I am!”

“I know you better than anyone in this world,” Jonghyun readily supplied, and even though he was only given an incredulous look in reply, he continued. “I do. I really do. Ask me anything.”

Kibum considered the offer for a moment with dangerous challenge in his eyes. But when his radio beckoned him out of his fifteen minute break, he shook his head and decided to walk away with a warning. “Don’t fuck with me, it won’t end well.”

“I—I know you lived with your grandmother until you were ten—!” the crazy man tried to stop him in an urgent voice. It worked, because Kibum had no idea how a complete stranger would know something like that about him.

He whirled on the guy and slammed him against the nearest wall. “That's not funny, asshole. Who put you up to this shit—?!” he hissed. “Who was it?!”

A pair of honey eyes look up at him with bottomless affection. “I know you loved her a lot and it nearly drove you insane to lose her,” a timid voice continued to try and convince him. “I know you decided then that you would never try to love anyone else as much because it hurt too much to lose them and—and that’s why you’re always so cold.”

Kibum’s grip on the man’s collar loosened, but he stayed in place, shocked at the words he was hearing. 

“But it doesn’t work like that, Kibum,” the man gave a small shake of the head. “We are what we are. We want what we want,” a hand came up between them to rest on his chest, not pushing him away but clearly intending to keep him in place. “You can’t decide not to fall in love. It’s not a _choice_.”

Kibum grit his jaw, swatting the palm away. “And what do you know about that?” he pulled the other’s collar again. “Eh? Why the fuck would you care about whether I… fall in love or some other shit like that?”

Jonghyun closed his eyes despite being jostled with some violence. To have Kibum hold him, even angrily, was all he wanted. To have Kibum exist was all he wanted. He let out a relieved sigh as Kibum moved back with threat in his gaze. “I know that your dream isn’t just to have a home,” he cut into the other’s verbal portents of harm.

Kibum fell silent then, once again looking astounded at Jonghyun’s words. But if he wanted to continue fighting he made no move to do so.

“I know that what you want the most is… is to share that home with someone,” he connected their gazes and kept them tied together, tightly bound. “What you really want. What you’ve always wanted, is that.”

Kibum took a frightened step back. 

“What you want the most is to be loved,” Jonghyun murmured. “Like me.”

* * *

When the door shut, Jonghyun looked around the room at its bare and lackluster furnishings. The sheets weren’t as soft, the lampshade was old and stained, the curtains looked like they were from a different decade. The wood was cheap, the varnish transparent. The sofa cushions seemed lumpy. He looked around and was about to say something to ease the awkwardness when he felt breath in the shell of his ear.

It was rushed, but also oddly calm. Slow and speeding in the same instance. Like cars rushing by at great velocity while their drivers remained at rest. He turned his head slowly until their noses caught on each other. “Hey…” someone whispered. It didn’t matter who it was, which one of the two. They were both running now, like trains on parallel tracks, hoping for a point where they converged and drove each other off the rails.

Hands, clammy and steady, clutched at the waist of his shirt. He felt his own pulse thrum in his ears, like the beat of an unfinished, unrefined song. It sounded perfect. It sounded wild. He closed his eyes and folded his arms around Kibum, their feet moving as if playing descending keys on a piano, lower and lower until the sound was a guttural hum that made everything vibrate with its resonance. With its discordant undertones. They exchanged more whispers then, but the words never registered. They made no sense anymore—everything that _did_ make sense now, resided on their fingertips, in their gazes, in the air between their nearly folded lips. Never touching yet completing a dozen kisses with every exchange of breath.

They’d gotten off the ship together. They’d alighted at Singapore and walked away from a smiling Jinki and his crew dressed in pristine white uniforms. Kibum had stalled for a while, sure. He’d had second thoughts about it all, even third and fourth thoughts. The cruise was all he knew. The sea was all he had grown to understand. But the longer he walked on solid ground, the more he looked like it had given him a renewed conviction in life. Like it had given him a purpose to leave his depths and float up to the surface.

They spent several weeks traveling the coast, biking along the sea and climbing hills. They spent their time repeating Jonghyun’s memories. But he didn’t mind. He didn’t care. They were alive. They were together. They had walked away. He didn’t care that he had to reintroduce himself for the thousand and first time. It didn’t matter. 

What mattered was that Kibum listened intently whenever he spoke. He didn’t close himself off. He didn’t hide. He didn’t push Jonghyun away. He didn’t build walls to brick himself behind them.

Maybe that was the change Jonghyun had been carefully watching for. 

Even so, it wasn’t difficult for him to let Kibum do what he did. It wasn’t difficult to give himself up completely, thighs trembling, hips raised, arms pushing the wall away. It wasn’t difficult to open himself up and revel in everything inside him. This was an autopsy of his feelings, a dissection that studied his every gasp his every moan his every whine. It wasn’t difficult to be under Kibum’s keen observation, under his prying fingers and his digging teeth and his pressing hip bones. It wasn’t difficult.

It wasn’t easy to hold himself steady. Everything slipped. Everything slid and fell between them. Their sweat, their voices, their time. It wasn’t easy to hold himself back when Jonghyun spoke his name like no one had ever spoken Kibum’s name. Like it was the only name in the world. Like it was the name of a god. It wasn’t easy when this was about him giving, but all he wanted to do was take. Take every whimper every sob every stutter and make it his. To own it the way he owned himself.

Jonghyun was golden all over: from the arms that rose to pull off his shirt to the glance that dipped shyly, to the way his skin glimmered the more Kibum saw of it—even under the hair and the wrinkles and the marks that rose out to greet his palms. Jonghyun was golden. It made him wonder if it was paint; if this was all a dream and not real. But no matter how much he rubbed, no matter how hard his palms kneaded, the color never came off. It stayed fixed.

He still didn’t know why Jonghyun knew him so well—why a total stranger could complete his thoughts as if he were a mindreader. He didn’t know, and he didn’t openly question it. But it always mystified him how easily Jonghyun accepted his every flaw, his every shortcoming like it was the most natural thing in the world. It perplexed him, that someone could like a man like him; that someone would see the unsightly and unpleasant sides of him, and still love him.

 _Love_ him… Kibum couldn’t believe the thought whenever it arrived.

It was like falling into the right place in a puzzle. A large, million-piece puzzle that stretched the length and breadth of the planet. It was like Kibum had finally found his spot, moving, sliding, stroking, leaning into Jonghyun’s back. This was his place. This was where he belonged. This was his abode. It was like he’d been lost for many years until short falcate fingernails had picked him up from the ground, fixed his corners, then pushed him into the right slot, next to the other pieces that linked with him. Like arms, locked and ready to start a dance that could only be completed now that Kibum was here. Now that he was with Jonghyun. Above him, inside him, against him. Everything was complete now. Everything could come to a slow end.

“Turn,” he said without being conscious of the pronunciation, without realizing the shape and meaning of the word. “Turn.” And when they were face-to-face it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy to let this remain as he had wanted it to remain. This was no longer a game like the other games he'd played. This was no longer a line in a series of crossed out lines. This was not a discernable boundary set a long time ago. This was none of that.

When their eyes met, Kibum couldn’t keep going. He couldn’t keep doing this. He couldn’t play. He couldn’t let himself go on with a pretense that was no longer a pretense. He couldn’t do it, and so he sat back and sighed heavily, stroked the length of shivering expectant thighs, kissed their knees, stroked and massaged their underside; he did that because he was sure this had become something else. This was no longer a game. This was a living breathing monster of his own making.

“One day I’ll ask for the truth. All of it, not just the nice parts,” he murmured before pulling Jonghyun closer to himself. He crawled up until their eyes met. “One day I’ll ask you who you really are. And if I don’t like what I hear, I could leave you,” he spoke with honesty.

“Would you still want to be with me?”

  
Jonghyun could’ve clicked his fingers, then. He could’ve molded time and molded his fate the way he wanted to. He could’ve given into his old temptation once again.

He could’ve.

* * *

Let’s suppose—

No.

This is not a supposition. Kibum knows this to be true now: there isn’t just one Jonghyun. There are a million of him.

He is everywhere, not just in this room, not just the version of him keening on the mattress under Kibum’s weight. There is a Jonghyun in his hometown, left behind for a better life. There is a Jonghyun in the dockyards, fixing big problems on little ships. There is a Jonghyun on a flight going somewhere Kibum will never be able to afford to go. Not outside of his job, never.

For every Jonghyun who eats at a table full of friends, there is a Jonghyun who nibbles at his cup ramyun alone.

For every Jonghyun floating on the surface of the ocean, his body undulating with the waves and not a single rescuer in sight–there is a Jonghyun sitting at home, wrapped in a thick blanket as he watches a stupid and mind-numbing TV show.

For every Jonghyun who is a husband, a father, a brother and a son, there is a Jonghyun who has no one and nothing to his name.

Out in the world, there is a Jonghyun who marches out every morning with his squadron, his hair cropped short and his rifle always within reach. There is also a Jonghyun who runs from the law, hides from it because his crimes are too great to be ignored.

There is a Jonghyun who is made of music, who sings like his pulse lives in the beats and his blood rushes in the tunes. But as the universe’s response, there is a Jonghyun who can’t stand even the overflowing sounds of someone else’s headphones.

There is a Jonghyun who is massive, as large as a planet, as large as several in fact. And there is Jonghyun that fits in a closed fist.

There is a Jonghyun who is immortal. There is a Jonghyun who dissipated in the slightest wind.

There is a Jonghyun in every home, in every town and city, in every country. There is a Jonghyun in the air, in space, on the moon, even as far as the ends of the solar system. There is a Jonghyun in every breath, in every beat of the heart, in every blink of the eyes. There is a Jonghyun wherever Kibum looks. Wherever he turns. There is a Jonghyun.

He exists. He does exist. But too much of him exists all at once. And even if Kibum were to make it his life’s mission to gather every Jonghyun into his arms, to make all the millions of molecules of Jonghyun floating through the atmosphere coalesce into one big Jonghyun that stood in front of him. Perfect. Unchangeable. Even if he decided to do that, he wouldn’t get very far from where he already was.

Because there is a little Jonghyun in Kibum. There is more Kibum in Jonghyun. They are each other, not separate, not divisible. They are one and the same thing. They are no more than the same person with different faces and different mannerisms but wanting the same things. Dreaming the same dreams. Moving together and against each other. Pulling and pushing in a meaningless tug of war that ended in neither’s victory and no one’s loss.

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_Click_

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